arXiv subjects

Andrea Janes

Publications and source records attributed to Andrea Janes.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

One Microservice per Developer: Is This the Trend in OSS?

When developing and managing microservice systems, practitioners suggest that each microservice should be owned by a particular team. In effect, there is only one team with the responsibility to manage a given service. Consequently, one developer should belong to only one team. This practice of "one-microservice-per-developer" is especially prevalent in large projects with an extensive development team. Based on the bazaar-style software development model of Open Source Projects, in which different programmers, like vendors at a bazaar, offer to help out developing different parts of the system, this article investigates whether we can observe the "one-microservice-per-developer" behavior, a strategy we assume anticipated within microservice based Open Source Projects. We conducted an empirical study among 38 microservice-based OS projects. Our findings indicate that the strategy is rarely respected by open-source developers except for projects that have dedicated DevOps teams.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Open Tracing Tools: Overview and Critical Comparison

Background. Coping with the rapid growing complexity in contemporary software architecture, tracing has become an increasingly critical practice and been adopted widely by software engineers. By adopting tracing tools, practitioners are able to monitor, debug, and optimize distributed software architectures easily. However, with excessive number of valid candidates, researchers and practitioners have a hard time finding and selecting the suitable tracing tools by systematically considering their features and advantages.Objective. To such a purpose, this paper aims to provide an overview of popular Open tracing tools via comparison. Method. Herein, we first identified \ra{30} tools in an objective, systematic, and reproducible manner adopting the Systematic Multivocal Literature Review protocol. Then, we characterized each tool looking at the 1) measured features, 2) popularity both in peer-reviewed literature and online media, and 3) benefits and issues. We used topic modeling and sentiment analysis to extract and summarize the benefits and issues. Specially, we adopted ChatGPT to support the topic interpretation. Results. As a result, this paper presents a systematic comparison amongst the selected tracing tools in terms of their features, popularity, benefits and issues. Conclusion. The result mainly shows that each tracing tool provides a unique combination of features with also different pros and cons. The contribution of this paper is to provide the practitioners better understanding of the tracing tools facilitating their adoption.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

On the Empirical Evidence of Microservice Logical Coupling. A Registered Report

[Context] Coupling is a widely discussed metric by software engineers while developing complex software systems, often referred to as a crucial factor and symptom of a poor or good design. Nevertheless, measuring the logical coupling among microservices and analyzing the interactions between services is non-trivial because it demands runtime information in the form of log files, which are not always accessible. [Objective and Method] In this work, we propose the design of a study aimed at empirically validating the Microservice Logical Coupling (MLC) metric presented in our previous study. In particular, we plan to empirically study Open Source Systems (OSS) built using a microservice architecture. [Results] The result of this work aims at corroborating the effectiveness and validity of the MLC metric. Thus, we will gather empirical evidence and develop a methodology to analyze and support the claims regarding the MLC metric. Furthermore, we establish its usefulness in evaluating and understanding the logical coupling among microservices.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

CATTO: Just-in-time Test Case Selection and Execution

Regression testing ensures a System Under Test (SUT) still works as expected after changes to it. The simplest approach for regression testing consists of re-running the entire test suite against the changed version of the SUT. However, this might result in a time- and resource-consuming process; \eg when dealing with large and/or complex SUTs and test suits. To work around this problem, test Case Selection (TCS) strategies can be used. Such strategies seek to build a temporary test suite comprising only those test cases that are relevant to the changes made to the SUT, so avoiding executing those test cases that do not exercise the changed parts. In this paper, we introduce CATTO (Commit Adaptive Tool for Test suite Optimization) and CATTO INTELLIJ PLUGIN. The former is a tool implementing a TCS strategy for SUTs written in Java, while the latter is a wrapper to allow developers to use \toolName directly in IntelliJ. We also conducted a preliminary evaluation of CATTO on seven open-source Java SUTs in terms of reductions in test-suite size, fault-reveling test cases, and fault-detection capability. The results are promising and suggest that CATTO can be of help to developers when performing regression testing. The video demo and the documentation of the tool is available at: \url{https://catto-tool.github.io/}

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Mining Software Repositories with a Collaborative Heuristic Repository

Many software engineering studies or tasks rely on categorizing software engineering artifacts. In practice, this is done either by defining simple but often imprecise heuristics, or by manual labelling of the artifacts. Unfortunately, errors in these categorizations impact the tasks that rely on them. To improve the precision of these categorizations, we propose to gather heuristics in a collaborative heuristic repository, to which researchers can contribute a large amount of diverse heuristics for a variety of tasks on a variety of SE artifacts. These heuristics are then leveraged by state-of-the-art weak supervision techniques to train high-quality classifiers, thus improving the categorizations. We present an initial version of the heuristic repository, which we applied to the concrete task of commit classification.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

Improving Predictability of User-Affecting Metrics to Support Anomaly Detection in Cloud Services

Anomaly detection systems aim to detect and report attacks or unexpected behavior in networked systems. Previous work has shown that anomalies have an impact on system performance, and that performance signatures can be effectively used for implementing an IDS. In this paper, we present an analytical and an experimental study on the trade-off between anomaly detection based on performance signatures and system scalability. The proposed approach combines analytical modeling and load testing to find optimal configurations for the signature-based IDS. We apply a heavy-tail bi-modal modeling approach, where "long" jobs represent large resource consuming transactions, e.g., generated by DDoS attacks; the model was parametrized using results obtained from controlled experiments. For performance purposes, mean response time is the key metric to be minimized, whereas for security purposes, response time variance and classification accuracy must be taken into account. The key insights from our analysis are: (i) there is an optimal number of servers which minimizes the response time variance, (ii) the sweet-spot number of servers that minimizes response time variance and maximizes classification accuracy is typically smaller than or equal to the one that minimizes mean response time. Therefore, for security purposes, it may be worth slightly sacrificing performance to increase classification accuracy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Big Code != Big Vocabulary: Open-Vocabulary Models for Source Code

Statistical language modeling techniques have successfully been applied to large source code corpora, yielding a variety of new software development tools, such as tools for code suggestion, improving readability, and API migration. A major issue with these techniques is that code introduces new vocabulary at a far higher rate than natural language, as new identifier names proliferate. Both large vocabularies and out-of-vocabulary issues severely affect Neural Language Models (NLMs) of source code, degrading their performance and rendering them unable to scale. In this paper, we address this issue by: 1) studying how various modelling choices impact the resulting vocabulary on a large-scale corpus of 13,362 projects; 2) presenting an open vocabulary source code NLM that can scale to such a corpus, 100 times larger than in previous work; and 3) showing that such models outperform the state of the art on three distinct code corpora (Java, C, Python). To our knowledge, these are the largest NLMs for code that have been reported. All datasets, code, and trained models used in this work are publicly available.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

Modeling Vocabulary for Big Code Machine Learning

When building machine learning models that operate on source code, several decisions have to be made to model source-code vocabulary. These decisions can have a large impact: some can lead to not being able to train models at all, others significantly affect performance, particularly for Neural Language Models. Yet, these decisions are not often fully described. This paper lists important modeling choices for source code vocabulary, and explores their impact on the resulting vocabulary on a large-scale corpus of 14,436 projects. We show that a subset of decisions have decisive characteristics, allowing to train accurate Neural Language Models quickly on a large corpus of 10,106 projects.

cs.CL↗