TraceSim: An Alignment Method for Computing Stack Trace Similarity

By Irving Muller Rodrigues, Aleksandr Khvorov, Daniel Aloise, Roman Vasiliev, Dmitrij Koznov, Eraldo Rezende Fernandes, George Chernishev, Dmitry Luciv, Nikita Povarov

Abstract

Software systems can automatically submit crash reports to a repository for investigation when program failures occur. A significant portion of these crash reports are duplicate, i.e., they are caused by the same software issue. Therefore, if the volume of submitted reports is very large, automatic grouping of duplicate crash reports can significantly ease and speed up analysis of software failures. This task is known as crash report deduplication. Given a huge volume of incoming reports, increasing quality of deduplication is an important task. The majority of studies address it via information retrieval or sequence matching methods based on the similarity of stack traces from two crash reports. While information retrieval methods disregard the position of a frame in a stack trace, the existing works based on sequence matching algorithms do not fully consider subroutine global frequency and unmatched frames. Besides, due to data distribution differences among software projects, parameters that are learned using machine learning algorithms are necessary to provide more flexibility to the methods. In this paper, we propose TraceSim – an approach for crash report deduplication which combines TF-IDF, optimum global alignment, and machine learning (ML) in a novel way. Moreover, we propose a new evaluation methodology for this task that is more comprehensive and robust than previously used evaluation approaches. TraceSim significantly outperforms seven baselines and state-of-the-art methods in the majority of the scenarios. It is the only approach that achieves competitive results on all datasets regarding all considered metrics. Moreover, we conduct an extensive ablation study that demonstrates the importance of each TraceSim’s element to its final performance and robustness. Finally, we provide the source code for all considered methods and evaluation methodology as well as the created datasets.

Install

Install the following packages:

conda install -c conda-forge hyperopt
conda install -c anaconda scikit-learn
conda install numpy
conda install -c conda-forge cython
conda install -c anaconda nltk
conda install -c anaconda gensim

python setup.py build_ext --inplace

Data

The data used in the paper can be found here. The four folders contain the dataset of the open-sources projects (Ubuntu, Eclipse, Netbeans, and Gnome). The original data from Ubuntu can be found on Campbell's work.

TF-IDF

We use the Lucene's implementation of TF-IDF. The Java code to run the experiments can be found on textual_similarity_deduplication.zip.

Usage

Below, we present example of how to run each method in a specific chunk:

# TraceSim
python experiments/hyperparameter_opt.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt  trace_sim  $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/space_script/trace_sim_space_eclipse.py -nthreads 20 -filter_func threshold_trim -sparse -max_evals 100 -w 730 -test $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt

# Moroo
python experiments/hyperparameter_opt.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt  moroo  $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/space_script/mooro_space_eclipse.py -nthreads 20 -filter_func threshold_trim -sparse -max_evals 100 -w 730 -test $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt  -top_n_file_validation $WORKSPACE/validation_result_files/lerch_eclipse_validation_0.sparse -top_n_file_test $WORKSPACE/test_result_files/lerch_eclipse_test_0.sparse

# PDM
python experiments/hyperparameter_opt.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt  pdm  $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/space_script/pdm_space_eclipse.py -nthreads 20 -filter_func threshold_trim -sparse -max_evals 100 -w 730 -test $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt


#Prefix Match
python experiments/hyperparameter_opt.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt  prefix_match  $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/space_script/prefix_match_space_eclipse.py -nthreads 20 -filter_func threshold_trim -sparse -max_evals 100 -w 730 -test $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt

# Brodie
python experiments/hyperparameter_opt.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt  brodie_05  $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/space_script/brodie_space_eclipse.py -nthreads 20 -filter_func threshold_trim -sparse -max_evals 100 -w 730 -test $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt

# NW
python experiments/hyperparameter_opt.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt  opt_align $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/space_script/opt_align_space_eclipse.py -nthreads 20 -filter_func threshold_trim -sparse -max_evals 100 -w 730 -test $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt

# DURFEX
python experiments/grid_search.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt  durfex $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/space_script/durfex_eclipse.py -nthreads 20 -filter_func threshold_trim -sparse -w 730 -test $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt


#TF-IDF
   cd $WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication
   /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64/bin/java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -classpath $WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/out/production/textual_similarity_deduplication:$WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/lib/json-simple-1.1.1.jar:$WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/lib/argparse4j-0.8.1.jar:$WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/lib/commons-io-2.7.jar:$WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/lib/commons-lang3-3.10.jar:$WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/lib/lucene-analyzers-common-8.5.2.jar:$WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/lib/lucene-core-8.5.2.jar:$WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/lib/lucene-queryparser-8.5.2.jar:/home/irving/ideaIU-2020.1.2/idea-IU-201.7846.76/lib/idea_rt.jar BugDeduplication -db $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json -training $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/training_chunk_0.txt $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/validation_chunk_0.txt -validation $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt  -index /home/irving/lucene_index -out $WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/test_result_files/lerch_eclipse_test_0.sparse -config $WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/test_config_eclipse.json -sparse -min_top_score 500 -window 730 > $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/lerch_eclipse_test_results/lerch_eclipse_test_java_run_0.log
   cd  $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE
   python experiments/calculate_metrics.py $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/eclipse_stacktraces.json $DATASET_PATH/eclipse_2018/chunks_test/test_chunk_0.txt -w 730 -add_cand -result_file $WORKSPACE/textual_similarity_deduplication/test_result_files/lerch_eclipse_test_0.sparse 2> $WORKSPACE/TraceSim_EMSE/lerch_eclipse_test_results/lerch_eclipse_test_python_run_0.log

Results

Paper results are in the following jupyter notebooks: test_results.ipynb and ablation_study_results.ipynb.

Citation

The paper was accepted and will be published in EMSE - Topical Collection: Machine Learning Techniques for Software Quality Evaluation (MaLTeSQuE).

@Article{rodrigues2021,
    author={Rodrigues, Irving Muller
        and Khvorov, Aleksandr
        and Aloise, Daniel
        and Vasiliev, Roman
        and Koznov, Dmitrij
        and Fernandes, Eraldo Rezende
        and Chernishev, George
        and Luciv, Dmitry
        and Povarov, Nikita},
    title={TraceSim: An Alignment Method for Computing Stack Trace Similarity},
    journal={Empirical Software Engineering},
    year={2022},
    month={Mar},
    day={01},
    volume={27},
    number={2},
    pages={53},
    issn={1573-7616},
    doi={10.1007/s10664-021-10070-w},
    url={https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10070-w},
    publisher={Springer}
}

License

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irving-muller/TraceSim_EMSE