Industry practices and event logging: assessment of a critical software development process

Practitioners widely recognize the importance of event logging for a variety of tasks, such as accounting, system measurements and troubleshooting. Nevertheless, in spite of the importance of the tasks based on the logs collected under real workload conditions, event logging lacks systematic design and implementation practices. The implementation of the logging mechanism strongly relies on the human expertise. This paper proposes a measurement study of event logging practices in a critical industrial domain. We assess a software development process at Selex ES, a leading Finmeccanica company in electronic and information solutions for critical systems. Our study combines source code analysis, inspection of around 2.3 millions log entries, and direct feedback from the development team to gain process-wide insights ranging from programming practices, logging objectives and issues impacting log analysis. The findings of our study were extremely valuable to prioritize event logging reengineering tasks at Selex ES.