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Background: Humor is a fundamental part of human communication, with prior work linking positive humor in the workplace to positive outcomes, such as improved performance and job satisfaction. Aims: This study aims to investigate programming-related humor in a large social media community. Methodology: We collected 139,718 submissions from Reddit subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor. Both textual and image-based (memes) submissions were considered. The image data was processed with OCR to extract text from images for NLP analysis. Multiple regression models were built to investigate what makes submissions humorous. Additionally, a random sample of 800 submissions was labeled by human annotators regarding their relation to theories of humor, suitability for the workplace, the need for programming knowledge to understand the submission, and whether images in image-based submissions added context to the submission. Results: Our results indicate that predicting the humor of software developers is difficult. Our best regression model was able to explain only 10% of the variance. However, statistically significant differences were observed between topics, submission times, and associated humor theories. Our analysis reveals that the highest submission scores are achieved by imagebased submissions that are created during the winter months in the northern hemisphere, between 2-3pm UTC on weekends, which are distinctly related to superiority and incongruity theories of humor, and are about the topic of "Learning". Conclusions: Predicting humor with natural language processing methods is challenging. We discuss the benefits and inherent difficulties in assessing perceived humor of submissions, as well as possible avenues for future work. Additionally, our replication package should help future studies and can act as a joke repository for the software industry and education., Comment: 11 pages. Accepted to International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) 2024 research track

Quantum computing has tremendous potential to overcome some of the fundamental limitations present in classical information processing. Yet, today's technological limitations in the quality and scaling prevent exploiting its full potential. Quantum computing based on superconducting quantum processing units (QPUs) is among the most promising approaches towards practical quantum advantage. In this article the basic technological approach of IQM Quantum Computers is described covering both the QPU and the rest of the full-stack quantum computer. In particular, the focus is on a 20-qubit quantum computer featuring the Garnet QPU and its architecture, which we will scale up to 150 qubits. We also present QPU and system-level benchmarks, including a median 2-qubit gate fidelity of 99.5% and genuinely entangling all 20 qubits in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state.

In the last decade, an impressive increase in software adaptions has led to a surge in log data production, making manual log analysis impractical and establishing the necessity for automated methods. Conversely, most automated analysis tools include a component designed to separate log templates from their parameters, commonly referred to as a "log parser". This paper aims to introduce a new fast and accurate log parser, named "Tipping". Tipping combines rule-based tokenizers, interdependency token graphs, strongly connected components, and various techniques to ensure rapid, scalable, and precise log parsing. Furthermore, Tipping is parallelized and capable of running on multiple processing cores with close to linear efficiency. We evaluated Tipping against other state-of-the-art log parsers in terms of accuracy, performance, and the downstream task of anomaly detection. Accordingly, we found that Tipping outperformed existing methods in accuracy and performance in our evaluations. More in-depth, Tipping can parse 11 million lines of logs in less than 20 seconds on a laptop machine. Furthermore, we re-implemented a parallelized version of the past IpLom algorithm to demonstrate the effect of parallel processing, and it became the second-fastest parser. As logs keep growing in volume and complexity, the software engineering community needs to ensure automated log analysis tools keep up with the demand, being capable of efficiently handling massive volumes of logs with high accuracy. Tipping's robustness, versatility, efficiency, and scalability make it a viable tool for the modern automated log analysis task.

Systematic review (SR) is a popular research method in software engineering (SE). However, conducting an SR takes an average of 67 weeks. Thus, automating any step of the SR process could reduce the effort associated with SRs. Our objective is to investigate if Large Language Models (LLMs) can accelerate title-abstract screening by simplifying abstracts for human screeners, and automating title-abstract screening. We performed an experiment where humans screened titles and abstracts for 20 papers with both original and simplified abstracts from a prior SR. The experiment with human screeners was reproduced with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 LLMs to perform the same screening tasks. We also studied if different prompting techniques (Zero-shot (ZS), One-shot (OS), Few-shot (FS), and Few-shot with Chain-of-Thought (FS-CoT)) improve the screening performance of LLMs. Lastly, we studied if redesigning the prompt used in the LLM reproduction of screening leads to improved performance. Text simplification did not increase the screeners' screening performance, but reduced the time used in screening. Screeners' scientific literacy skills and researcher status predict screening performance. Some LLM and prompt combinations perform as well as human screeners in the screening tasks. Our results indicate that the GPT-4 LLM is better than its predecessor, GPT-3.5. Additionally, Few-shot and One-shot prompting outperforms Zero-shot prompting. Using LLMs for text simplification in the screening process does not significantly improve human performance. Using LLMs to automate title-abstract screening seems promising, but current LLMs are not significantly more accurate than human screeners. To recommend the use of LLMs in the screening process of SRs, more research is needed. We recommend future SR studies publish replication packages with screening data to enable more conclusive experimenting with LLM screening., Comment: Accepted to the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), 2024 edition

Microservice-based systems (MSS) may experience failures in various fault categories due to their complex and dynamic nature. To effectively handle failures, AIOps tools utilize trace-based anomaly detection and root cause analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for few-shot abnormal trace classification for MSS. Our framework comprises two main components: (1) Multi-Head Attention Autoencoder for constructing system-specific trace representations, which enables (2) Transformer Encoder-based Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning to perform effective and efficient few-shot learning for abnormal trace classification. The proposed framework is evaluated on two representative MSS, Trainticket and OnlineBoutique, with open datasets. The results show that our framework can adapt the learned knowledge to classify new, unseen abnormal traces of novel fault categories both within the same system it was initially trained on and even in the different MSS. Within the same MSS, our framework achieves an average accuracy of 93.26\% and 85.2\% across 50 meta-testing tasks for Trainticket and OnlineBoutique, respectively, when provided with 10 instances for each task. In a cross-system context, our framework gets an average accuracy of 92.19\% and 84.77\% for the same meta-testing tasks of the respective system, also with 10 instances provided for each task. Our work demonstrates the applicability of achieving few-shot abnormal trace classification for MSS and shows how it can enable cross-system adaptability. This opens an avenue for building more generalized AIOps tools that require less system-specific data labeling for anomaly detection and root cause analysis., Comment: 12 pages

Software log analysis can be laborious and time consuming. Time and labeled data are usually lacking in industrial settings. This paper studies unsupervised and time efficient methods for anomaly detection. We study two custom and two established models. The custom models are: an OOV (Out-Of-Vocabulary) detector, which counts the terms in the test data that are not present in the training data, and the Rarity Model (RM), which calculates a rarity score for terms based on their infrequency. The established models are KMeans and Isolation Forest. The models are evaluated on four public datasets (BGL, Thunderbird, Hadoop, HDFS) with three different representation techniques for the log messages (Words, character Trigrams, Parsed events). For training, we used both normal-only data, which is free of all anomalies, and unfiltered data, which contains both normal and anomalous instances. We used primarily the AUC-ROC metric for evaluation due to challenges in setting a threshold but we also include F1-scores for further insight. Different configurations are advised based on specific requirements. When training data is unfiltered, includes both normal and anomalous instances, the most effective combination is the Isolation Forest with event representation, achieving an AUC-ROC of 0.829. If it's possible to create a normal-only training dataset, combining the Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) detector with trigram representation yields the highest AUC-ROC of 0.846. For speed considerations, the OOV detector is optimal for filtered data, while the Rarity Model is the best choice for unfiltered data., Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security. Title adjusted from first version

This paper introduces LogLead, a tool designed for efficient log analysis benchmarking. LogLead combines three essential steps in log processing: loading, enhancing, and anomaly detection. The tool leverages Polars, a high-speed DataFrame library. We currently have Loaders for eight systems that are publicly available (HDFS, Hadoop, BGL, Thunderbird, Spirit, Liberty, TrainTicket, and GC Webshop). We have multiple enhancers with three parsers (Drain, Spell, LenMa), Bert embedding creation and other log representation techniques like bag-of-words. LogLead integrates to five supervised and four unsupervised machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection from SKLearn. By integrating diverse datasets, log representation methods and anomaly detectors, LogLead facilitates comprehensive benchmarking in log analysis research. We show that log loading from raw file to dataframe is over 10x faster with LogLead compared to past solutions. We demonstrate roughly 2x improvement in Drain parsing speed by off-loading log message normalization to LogLead. Our brief benchmarking on HDFS indicates that log representations extending beyond the bag-of-words approach offer limited additional benefits. Tool URL: https://github.com/EvoTestOps/LogLead, Comment: 2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

Most Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) research utilizes explicit SATD features such as 'TODO' and 'FIXME' for SATD detection. A closer look reveals several SATD research uses simple SATD ('Easy to Find') code comments without the contextual data (preceding and succeeding source code context). This work addresses this gap through PENTACET (or 5C dataset) data. PENTACET is a large Curated Contextual Code Comments per Contributor and the most extensive SATD data. We mine 9,096 Open Source Software Java projects with a total of 435 million LOC. The outcome is a dataset with 23 million code comments, preceding and succeeding source code context for each comment, and more than 250,000 comments labeled as SATD, including both 'Easy to Find' and 'Hard to Find' SATD. We believe PENTACET data will further SATD research using Artificial Intelligence techniques., Comment: Accepted in MSR 2023 Tools and Data Showcase

The present study investigates the role of source characteristics, evidence quality, crowdsourcing platform, and prior beliefs of the topic in adult readers' credibility evaluations of short healthrelated social media posts. Researchers designed content for the posts concerning five health topics by manipulating source characteristics (source's expertise, gender, and ethnicity), accuracy of the claims, and evidence quality (research evidence, testimony, consensus, and personal experience) in the posts. Then, accurate and inaccurate posts varying in these other manipulated aspects were computer-generated. Crowdworkers (N = 844) recruited from two platforms were asked to evaluate the credibility of ten social media posts, resulting in 8380 evaluations. Before credibility evaluation, participants' prior beliefs on the topics of the posts were assessed. Results showed that prior belief consistency and source expertise most affected the perceived credibility of accurate and inaccurate social media posts after controlling for the topic of the post. In contrast, the quality of evidence supporting the health claim mattered relatively little. In addition, the data collection platform had a notable impact, such that posts containing inaccurate claims were much more likely to be rated higher on one platform compared to the other. Implications for credibility evaluation theory and research are discussed., Comment: 25 pages, 5 figures including the appendix. Submitted to a journal for peer review

Background: Continuous experimentation (CE) has been proposed as a data-driven approach to software product development. Several challenges with this approach have been described in large organisations, but its application in smaller companies with early-stage products remains largely unexplored. Aims: The goal of this study is to understand what factors could affect the adoption of CE in early-stage software startups. Method: We present a descriptive multiple-case study of five startups in Finland which differ in their utilisation of experimentation. Results: We find that practices often mentioned as prerequisites for CE, such as iterative development and continuous integration and delivery, were used in the case companies. CE was not widely recognised or used as described in the literature. Only one company performed experiments and used experimental data systematically. Conclusions: Our study indicates that small companies may be unlikely to adopt CE unless 1) at least some company employees have prior experience with the practice, 2) the company's limited available resources are not exceeded by its adoption, and 3) the practice solves a problem currently experienced by the company, or the company perceives almost immediate benefit of adopting it. We discuss implications for advancing CE in early-stage startups and outline directions for future research on the approach., Comment: 23rd International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2022)

Software Log anomaly event detection with masked event prediction has various technical approaches with countless configurations and parameters. Our objective is to provide a baseline of settings for similar studies in the future. The models we use are the N-Gram model, which is a classic approach in the field of natural language processing (NLP), and two deep learning (DL) models long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN). For datasets we used four datasets Profilence, BlueGene/L (BGL), Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Hadoop. Other settings are the size of the sliding window which determines how many surrounding events we are using to predict a given event, mask position (the position within the window we are predicting), the usage of only unique sequences, and the portion of data that is used for training. The results show clear indications of settings that can be generalized across datasets. The performance of the DL models does not deteriorate as the window size increases while the N-Gram model shows worse performance with large window sizes on the BGL and Profilence datasets. Despite the popularity of Next Event Prediction, the results show that in this context it is better not to predict events at the edges of the subsequence, i.e., first or last event, with the best result coming from predicting the fourth event when the window size is five. Regarding the amount of data used for training, the results show differences across datasets and models. For example, the N-Gram model appears to be more sensitive toward the lack of data than the DL models. Overall, for similar experimental setups we suggest the following general baseline: Window size 10, mask position second to last, do not filter out non-unique sequences, and use a half of the total data for training., Comment: Accepted to the New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) track of the 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

Mature test automation is key for achieving software quality at speed. In this paper, we present a multivocal literature review with the objective to survey and synthesize the guidelines given in the literature for improving test automation maturity. We selected and reviewed 81 primary studies, consisting of 26 academic literature and 55 grey literature sources. From primary studies, we extracted 26 test automation best practices (e.g., Define an effective test automation strategy, Set up good test environments, Develop high-quality test scripts) and collected many pieces of advice (e.g., in forms of implementation/improvement approaches, technical techniques, concepts, experience-based heuristics) on how to conduct these best practices. We made main observations: (1) There are only 6 best practices whose positive effect on maturity improvement have been evaluated by academic studies using formal empirical methods; (2) Several technical related best practices in this MLR were not presented in test maturity models; (3) Some best practices can be linked to success factors and maturity impediments proposed by other scholars; (4) Most pieces of advice on how to conduct proposed best practices were identified from experience studies and their effectiveness need to be further evaluated with cross-site empirical evidence using formal empirical methods; (5) In the literature, some advice on how to conduct certain best practices are conflicting, and some advice on how to conduct certain best practices still need further qualitative analysis., Comment: Journal of Software: Testing, Verification and Reliability (2022)

As stability testing execution logs can be very long, software engineers need help in locating anomalous events. We develop and evaluate two models for scoring individual log-events for anomalousness, namely an N-Gram model and a Deep Learning model with LSTM (Long short-term memory). Both are trained on normal log sequences only. We evaluate the models with long log sequences of Android stability testing in our company case and with short log sequences from HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) public dataset. We evaluate next event prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. The LSTM model is more accurate in stability testing logs (0.848 vs 0.865), whereas in HDFS logs the N-Gram is slightly more accurate (0.904 vs 0.900). The N-Gram model has far superior computational efficiency compared to the Deep model (4 to 13 seconds vs 16 minutes to nearly 4 hours), making it the preferred choice for our case company. Scoring individual log events for anomalousness seems like a good aid for root cause analysis of failing test cases, and our case company plans to add it to its online services. Despite the recent surge in using deep learning in software system anomaly detection, we found limited benefits in doing so. However, future work should consider whether our finding holds with different LSTM-model hyper-parameters, other datasets, and with other deep-learning approaches that promise better accuracy and computational efficiency than LSTM based models., Comment: Accepted to 5th Workshop on NEXt level of Test Automation (NEXTA), ICST Workshops 2022

The popularity of continuous integration (CI) is increasing as a result of market pressure to release product features or updates frequently. The ability of CI to deliver quality at speed depends on reliable test automation. In this paper, we present an empirical study to observe the effect of test automation maturity (assessed by standard best practices in the literature) on product quality, test automation effort, and release cycle in the CI context of open source projects. We run our test automation maturity survey and got responses from 37 open source java projects. We also mined software repositories of the same projects. The main results of regression analysis reveal that, higher levels of test automation maturity are positively associated with higher product quality (p-value=0.000624) and shorter release cycle (p-value=0.01891); There is no statistically significant evidence of increased test automation effort due to higher levels of test automation maturity and product quality. Thus, we conclude that, a potential benefit of improving test automation maturity (using standard best practices) is product quality improvement and release cycle acceleration in the CI context of open source projects. We encourage future research to extend our findings by adding more datasets with different programming languages and CI tools, closed source projects, and large-scale industrial projects. Our recommendation to practitioners (in the similar CI context) is to utilize standard best practices to improve test automation maturity.

Reports of poor work well-being and fluctuating productivity in software engineering have been reported in both academic and popular sources. Understanding and predicting these issues through repository analysis might help manage software developers' well-being. Our objective is to link data from software repositories, that is commit activity, communication, expressed sentiments, and job events, with measures of well-being obtained with a daily experience sampling questionnaire. To achieve our objective, we studied a single software project team for eight months in the software industry. Additionally, we performed semi-structured interviews to explain our results. The acquired quantitative data are analyzed with generalized linear mixed-effects models with autocorrelation structure. We find that individual variance accounts for most of the $R^2$ values in models predicting developers' experienced well-being and productivity. In other words, using software repository variables to predict developers' well-being or productivity is challenging due to individual differences. Prediction models developed for each developer individually work better, with fixed effects $R^2$ value of up to 0.24. The semi-structured interviews give insights into the well-being of software developers and the benefits of chat interaction. Our study suggests that individualized prediction models are needed for well-being and productivity prediction in software development., Comment: Accepted to Empirical Software Engineering journal

With the growth of online services, IoT devices, and DevOps-oriented software development, software log anomaly detection is becoming increasingly important. Prior works mainly follow a traditional four-staged architecture (Preprocessor, Parser, Vectorizer, and Classifier). This paper proposes OneLog, which utilizes a single Deep Neural Network (DNN) instead of multiple separate components. OneLog harnesses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) at the character level to take digits, numbers, and punctuations, which were removed in prior works, into account alongside the main natural language text. We evaluate our approach in six message- and sequence-based data sets: HDFS, Hadoop, BGL, Thunderbird, Spirit, and Liberty. We experiment with Onelog with single-, multi-, and cross-project setups. Onelog offers state-of-the-art performance in our datasets. Onelog can utilize multi-project datasets simultaneously during training, which suggests our model can generalize between datasets. Multi-project training also improves Onelog performance making it ideal when limited training data is available for an individual project. We also found that cross-project anomaly detection is possible with a single project pair (Liberty and Spirit). Analysis of model internals shows that one log has multiple modes of detecting anomalies and that the model learns manually validated parsing rules for the log messages. We conclude that character-based CNNs are a promising approach toward end-to-end learning in log anomaly detection. They offer good performance and generalization over multiple datasets. We will make our scripts publicly available upon the acceptance of this paper.

Logs are semi-structured text files that represent software's execution paths and states during its run-time. Therefore, detecting anomalies in software logs reflect anomalies in the software's execution path or state. So, it has become a notable concern in software engineering. We use LSTM like many prior works, and on top of LSTM, we propose a novel anomaly detection approach based on the Siamese network. This paper also provides an authentic validation of the approach on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) log dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach outperforms other methods on the same dataset at the F1 score of 0.996, resulting in a new state-of-the-art performance on the dataset. Along with the primary method, we introduce a novel training pair generation algorithm that reduces generated training pairs by the factor of 3000 while maintaining the F1 score, merely a modest decay from 0.996 to 0.995. Additionally, we propose a hybrid model by combining the Siamese network with a traditional feedforward neural network to make end-to-end training possible, reducing engineering effort in setting up a deep-learning-based log anomaly detector. Furthermore, we examine our method's robustness to log evolutions by evaluating the model on synthetically evolved log sequences; we got the F1 score of 0.95 at the noise ratio of 20%. Finally, we dive deep into some of the side benefits of the Siamese network. Accordingly, we introduce a method of monitoring the evolutions of logs without label requirements at run-time. Additionally, we present a visualization technique that facilitates human administrations of log anomaly detection.

When developers use different keywords such as TODO and FIXME in source code comments to describe self-admitted technical debt (SATD), we refer it as Keyword-Labeled SATD (KL-SATD). We study KL-SATD from 33 software repositories with 13,588 KL-SATD comments. We find that the median percentage of KL-SATD comments among all comments is only 1,52%. We find that KL-SATD comment contents include words expressing code changes and uncertainty, such as remove, fix, maybe and probably. This makes them different compared to other comments. KL-SATD comment contents are similar to manually labeled SATD comments of prior work. Our machine learning classifier using logistic Lasso regression has good performance in detecting KL-SATD comments (AUC-ROC 0.88). Finally, we demonstrate that using machine learning we can identify comments that are currently missing but which should have a SATD keyword in them. Automating SATD identification of comments that lack SATD keywords can save time and effort by replacing manual identification of comments. Using KL-SATD offers a potential to bootstrap a complete SATD detector., Comment: Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA'20)

Recent works have proposed that software developers' positive emotion has a positive impact on software developers' productivity. In this paper we investigate two data sources: developers chat messages (from Slack and Hipchat) and source code commits of a single co-located Agile team over 200 working days. Our regression analysis shows that the number of chat messages is the best predictor and predicts productivity measured both in the number of commits and lines of code with $R^2$ of 0.33 and 0.27 respectively. We then add sentiment analysis variables until AIC of our model no longer improves and gets $R^2$ values of 0.37 (commits) and 0.30 (lines of code). Thus, analyzing chat sentiment improves productivity prediction over chat activity alone but the difference is not massive. This work supports the idea that emotional state and productivity are linked in software development. We find that three positive sentiment metrics, but surprisingly also one negative sentiment metric is associated with higher productivity., Comment: Semotion 2020, 4 pages, 1 figure

The software industry has seen an increasing interest in test automation. In this paper, we present a test automation maturity survey serving as a self-assessment for practitioners. Based on responses of 151 practitioners coming from above 101 organizations in 25 countries, we make observations regarding the state of the practice of test automation maturity: a) The level of test automation maturity in different organizations is differentiated by the practices they adopt; b) Practitioner reported the quite diverse situation with respect to different practices, e.g., 85\% practitioners agreed that their test teams have enough test automation expertise and skills, while 47\% of practitioners admitted that there is lack of guidelines on designing and executing automated tests; c) Some practices are strongly correlated and/or closely clustered; d) The percentage of automated test cases and the use of Agile and/or DevOps development models are good indicators for a higher test automation maturity level; (e) The roles of practitioners may affect response variation, e.g., QA engineers give the most optimistic answers, consultants give the most pessimistic answers. Our results give an insight into present test automation processes and practices and indicate chances for further improvement in the present industry.

How to successfully conduct test automation process improvement (TAPI) for continuous development, consisting of iterative software development, continuous testing, and delivery, is the challenge faced by many software organizations. In this paper, we present an experience report on TAPI in one DevOps team in F-Secure (a Finnish software company). The team builds Windows application software and exists in F-Secure's TAPI culture. The team self-reports high satisfaction and maturity in test automation for continuous development. To study their TAPI, we reviewed a collection of experience notes, team reflection reports and telemetry result reports. Then several meetings were held to discuss the details. We found that based on the understanding of the team, test automation maturity for continuous development is defined as a set of indicators, e.g., the increasing speed to release, improving the productivity of the team, high test efficiency. Second, the team indicated that a set of critical success factors have a major impact on successfully carrying out its TAPI, e.g., incremental approach, the whole team effort, test tool choice and architecture, telemetry. Third, we compare the TAPI practices in the observed team with the practices described in prior literature. The team believes that the existing test automation maturity approaches should include the identified practices like the whole team effort to build a more comprehensive test automation improvement model for the software industry.

Data of long-lived and high profile projects is valuable for research on successful software engineering in the wild. Having a dataset with different linked software repositories of such projects, enables deeper diving investigations. This paper presents 20-MAD, a dataset linking the commit and issue data of Mozilla and Apache projects. It includes over 20 years of information about 765 projects, 3.4M commits, 2.3M issues, and 17.3M issue comments, and its compressed size is over 6 GB. The data contains all the typical information about source code commits (e.g., lines added and removed, message and commit time) and issues (status, severity, votes, and summary). The issue comments have been pre-processed for natural language processing and sentiment analysis. This includes emoticons and valence and arousal scores. Linking code repository and issue tracker information, allows studying individuals in two types of repositories and provide more accurate time zone information for issue trackers as well. To our knowledge, this the largest linked dataset in size and in project lifetime that is not based on GitHub., Comment: 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 2020