Towards understanding bugs in an open source cloud management stack: An empirical study of OpenStack software bugs

Wei Zheng; Chen Feng; Tingting Yu; Xibing Yang; Xiaoxue Wu

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2019.02.025

Towards understanding bugs in an open source cloud management stack: An empirical study of OpenStack software bugs

Wei Zheng, Chen Feng, Tingting Yu, Xibing Yang, Xiaoxue Wu

Computer Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Cloud management stack (CMS) provides convenience for organizations in managing their cloud platforms. CMS software is complex and bugs in it can cause serious damage to the cloud environment. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of CMS bugs can help developers detect and fix them. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical study of several key characteristics of bugs in OpenStack — the most popular open source CMS. Our study computes general statistics for about 50K OpenStack bugs, including the evolution of bugs, the distribution of bugs, and the duration of bugs. We then selected 579 bugs for an in-depth study. In particular, we study the input factors for triggering the bugs, the consequences of the bugs, and how the bugs are fixed. The findings of this study provide a set of lessons learned and guidance to aid practitioners and researchers to better handle bugs in CMS software.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	210-223
Number of pages	14
Journal	Journal of Systems and Software
Volume	151
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.02.025
State	Published - May 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Inc.

Keywords

Bug reports
Cloud management stack
Empirical study
Openstack

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Information Systems
Hardware and Architecture

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10.1016/j.jss.2019.02.025

Cite this

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abstract = "Cloud management stack (CMS) provides convenience for organizations in managing their cloud platforms. CMS software is complex and bugs in it can cause serious damage to the cloud environment. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of CMS bugs can help developers detect and fix them. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical study of several key characteristics of bugs in OpenStack — the most popular open source CMS. Our study computes general statistics for about 50K OpenStack bugs, including the evolution of bugs, the distribution of bugs, and the duration of bugs. We then selected 579 bugs for an in-depth study. In particular, we study the input factors for triggering the bugs, the consequences of the bugs, and how the bugs are fixed. The findings of this study provide a set of lessons learned and guidance to aid practitioners and researchers to better handle bugs in CMS software.",

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Towards understanding bugs in an open source cloud management stack: An empirical study of OpenStack software bugs

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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