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，如逆向工程的性能评估和体系结构恢复。Kieker研究软件为这些研究目的提供监测、分析和可视化支持。它始于2006年，并在过去十年中发展成为一种开源软件，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来推进Kieker软件框架。有了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在一起，从而形成交互式教程。扩展自动化质量保证是SustainKieker的目标。具体地说，我们计划显著地增加测试覆盖率，引入静态架构检查，扩展回归基准测试，并为最先进的自动化采用GitOps。通过这种方式，SustainKieker也可以作为其他研究软件项目的蓝图，这些项目努力使其质量保证自动化。我们计划通过对Kieker软件架构的改造，为进一步发展创造更好的条件。GitOps程序还将改进社区贡献的过程。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解决这个问题。作为具体措施，我们将实证评估带有嵌入式在线演示的教程的效果和黑客马拉松的影响。我们很清楚，针对学生的对照实验和针对黑客马拉松的行动研究的外部有效性是有限的。外部效度是指你可以将研究结果推广到其他情况的程度。然而，我们认为这是在这个提议的项目中研究软件科学的最初可行和可行的一步。

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.