Rule based event log generation technique using reverse engineering

Abstract

In many software systems logging has been implemented inaccurately, their effectiveness during the maintenance period to identify the failures and address them quickly is very less. This in turn increases the software maintenance cost and reduces reliability of the system as many errors are unreported. This paper aims at proposing and studying a rule based approach to make the logs more effective. The source code of the target systems gets reverse engineered and acts as the primary input for this approach to introduce the automated logs into the source code. This is instrumented by a logger code driven by a set of predefined rules which are woven around the life cycle of the system entities. The validity of the approach is verified by means of a preliminary fault injection experiment into a real world system.