A Study of Bugs Found in the Moby Configuration Management System

Bachelor thesis (2022)

Authors

M. Bonfanti Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

D. Spinellis Software Engineering - EEMCS (mentor)
Thodoris Sotiropoulos Athens University of Economics and Business (mentor)
F. Broz Interactive Intelligence - EEMCS (graduation committee member)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Mattia Bonfanti
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Published Date

22-06-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

The study of bugs can provide important information to understand their nature in the context of complex software systems as well as supporting developers in their detection, fix and prevention. Previous studies focused on analyzing bugs under different perspectives such as changes at code level, frequency, semantics, symptoms, root causes and reproducibility through test cases. Although these studies offer valid methodologies that can be applied in different areas of bugs analysis, literature suggests that very little focus has been aimed towards configuration management systems.

This research has the goal to provide a characterization of bugs in the Moby configuration management system, an open framework used to create container systems. A random sample of 100 collected Moby bugs is manually inspected and categorized by their (1) symptoms, (2) root causes, (3) impact, (4) fixes, (5) system dependency and (6) triggers. Some representative takeaways suggest that: bugs symptoms are mostly linked to a specific root cause, which means that bugs occur in certain areas of the system; the modular nature of Moby drives up the criticality of the bugs as each component needs to work correctly; bugs are overall hard to reproduce as only 24.5\% of the fixes included a test case; developing an automatic tool that provides a historical distribution of bugs can support maintainers in their work by enhancing bugs prevention.

The research provides an analysis and categorization of bugs in the Moby configuration management system. The work adds a new perspective to the literature on the topics of both bugs analysis and configuration management systems and can be used as a starting point for further studies.