Architecture-based Issue Propagation Analysis

Modern software systems usually consist of multiple components, e.g., libraries or (micro-)services, that can be defined through their contract. These components are often developed independently and use their own issue management systems (IMSs). Due to composing these components into a larger architecture, issues such as bugs can propagate along the call chains throughout the entire architecture. However, when experiencing an issue in one component, identifying that such an issue originates, e.g., from a component multiple calls deeper into the graph, is challenging and error-prone as the propagation path has to be identified and the components’ IMS investigated for the root-causing issue. Therefore, this paper proposes a model-based issue propagation analysis concept by annotating the Gropius architecture graph with issue propagation rules. Based on the characteristics of the issue, the analysis follows the rules and creates a potential issue propagation graph. Developers can accept resulting issues and semi-automatically create them for the affected components. We conducted experiments on a reference architecture for 21 propagation root-causing issues and compared the results with manually identified propagation paths. ... mehrThe results show that such an analysis can uncover issue propagations well with a recall of 0.99. However, precision can differ among different issue characteristics.