Sustaining a Reusable High-Quality Monitoring Framework for Software Engineering Research

软件系统的应用级监控和动态分析是软件工程研究中各种任务的基础，如性能评估和逆向工程的体系结构恢复。Kieker研究软件为这些研究目的提供监测、分析和可视化支持。它开始于2006年，并朝着开源软件的方向发展，在过去的十年中，它已被用于各种软件工程研究项目。几个研究小组组成了开源社区，以推进Kieker软件框架。通过SustainKieker，我们打算将Kieker作为一个可重复使用的高质量监测框架，用于更广泛的研究领域，并被更大的社区使用。扩展互操作性是SustainKieker的目标。为了提高Kieker的可用性和初始技能培训，我们还将为新的研究领域构建教程演示。一个目标是将用户指南与在线演示应用程序集成，以生成交互式教程。延长自动化质量保证是SustainKieker的目标。具体来说，我们计划显著增加测试覆盖率，引入静态架构检查，扩展回归基准测试，并采用GitOps实现最先进的自动化。通过这种方式，SustainKieker也可以作为其他研究软件项目的蓝图，这些项目致力于自动化质量保证。通过SustainKieker，我们计划通过重新设计Kieker的软件架构为进一步开发创造更好的条件。GitOps程序还将改进社区贡献的流程。通过SustainKieker，我们还通过软件工程研究为研究软件工程的开创性工作做出了贡献，以建立研究软件科学作为一门学科。我们将通过实证软件工程研究来实现这一目标。作为具体措施，我们将实证评估嵌入在线演示的教程的效果和黑客马拉松的影响。我们很清楚，对学生的控制实验和对黑客松的行动研究具有有限的外部效度。外部效度是指你可以将一项研究的发现推广到其他情况的程度。然而，我们认为这是一个初步的可行性和可行性的一步，研究软件科学在这个拟议的项目。

Application-level monitoring and dynamic analysis of software systems are a basis for various tasks in software engineering research, such as performance evaluation and architecture recovery for reverse engineering. The Kieker research software provides monitoring, analysis, and visualization support for these research purposes. It commenced in 2006, and grew toward an open-source software that has been employed in a variety of software engineering research projects over the last decade. Several research groups constitute the open-source community to advance the Kieker software framework. With SustainKieker, we intend to sustain Kieker as a reusable high-quality monitoring framework that will be employed in a wider variety of research areas and used by a larger community. Extended interoperability is a goal for SustainKieker. To improve the usability and the initial skill training for Kieker, we will also build tutorial demos for the new research areas. One goal is to integrate the user guides with the online demo applications to result in interactive tutorials. Extended automated quality assurance is a goal for SustainKieker. Specifically, we plan to significantly increase the test coverage, introduce static architecture checks, extend regression benchmarking, and adopt GitOps for state-of-the-art automation. This way, SustainKieker may also serve as a blueprint for other research software projects that strive for automating their quality assurance. With SustainKieker, we plan to create better conditions for further development via remodularizing Kieker’s software architecture. The GitOps procedures will also improve the process for community contributions. With SustainKieker, we also contribute to the seminal work on research software engineering via software engineering research toward establishing research software science as a discipline. We will address this goal via empirical software engineering research. As specific measures, we will empirically evaluate the effect of tutorials with embedded online demos and the impact of hackathons. We are well aware that controlled experiments with students and action research with hackathons has limited external validity. External validity is the extent to which you can generalize the findings of a study to other situations. However, we consider this to be an initial viable and feasible step toward research software science within this proposed project.