Automated Defects Detection and Fix in Logging Statement

Abstract: Developers use logging statements to monitor software, but misleading logs can complicate maintenance by obscuring actual activities. Existing research on logging quality issues is limited, mainly focusing on single defects and manual fixes. To address this, we conducted a study identifying four defect types in logging statements through real-world log changes analysis. We propose LogFixer, a two-stage framework for automatic detection and updating of logging statements. In the offline stage, LogFixer uses a similarity-based classifier on synthetic defective logs to identify defects. During the online phase, this classifier evaluates logs in code snippets to determine necessary improvements, and an LLM-based recommendation framework suggests updates based on historical log changes. We evaluated LogFixer on real-world and synthetic datasets, and new real-world projects, achieving an F1 score of 0.625. LogFixer significantly improved static text and dynamic variables suggestions by 48.12\% and 24.90\%, respectively, and achieved a 61.49\% success rate in recommending correct updates for new projects. We reported 40 problematic logs to GitHub, resulting in 25 confirmed and merged changes across 11 projects.