Automating Root Cause Analysis via Machine Learning in Agile Software Testing Environments

Abstract

We apply machine learning to automate the root cause analysis in agile software testing environments. In particular, we extract relevant features from raw log data after interviewing testing engineers (human experts). Initial efforts are put into clustering the unlabeled data, and despite obtaining weak correlations between several clusters and failure root causes, the vagueness in the rest of the clusters leads to the consideration of labeling. A new round of interviews with the testing engineers leads to the definition of five ground-truth categories. Using manually labeled data, we train artificial neural networks that either classify the data or pre-process it for clustering. The resulting method achieves an accuracy of 88.9%. The methodology of this paper serves as a prototype or baseline approach for the extraction of expert knowledge and its adaptation to machine learning techniques for root cause analysis in agile environments.