End-to-end log statement generation at block-level

Abstract

Logging is crucial in software development for addressing runtime issues but can pose challenges. Logging encompasses four essential sub-tasks: whether to log (Whether), where to log (Position), which log level (Level), and what information to log (Message). While existing approaches have performed well, they suffer from two limitations. Firstly, they address only a subset of the logging sub-tasks. Secondly, most of them focus on generating single log statements at class or method level, potentially overlooking multiple log statements within those scopes.

To address these issues, we propose ELogger, which enables end-to-end log statement generation at block-level. Furthermore, ELogger implements block-level log generation, enabling it to handle multiple log statements within different code blocks of a method. Evaluation results indicate that ELogger correctly predicts all four sub-tasks in 19.55% of cases. Compared to the baselines that combined existing approaches for end-to-end log statement generation, ELogger demonstrates a significant improvement with a 50.85% to 78.21% average increase. Additionally, ELogger correctly predicts whether to log in 71.68% of cases, two sub-tasks (Whether and Position) in 58.29% of cases, and three sub-tasks (Whether, Position, and Level) in 41.97% of cases, all of which outperform the baselines.