2021/03/25 by Zehao Wang, Wang, Zehao · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software System Performance and Reliability
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.14177
openalex publication_date 2021/03/25 · openalex created_date 2021/04/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
To process data more efficiently, big data frameworks provide data abstractions to developers. However, due to the abstraction, there may be many challenges for developers to understand and debug the data processing code. To uncover the challenges in using big data frameworks, we first conduct an empirical study on 1,000 Apache Spark-related questions on Stack Overflow. We find that most of the challenges are related to data transformation and API usage. To solve these challenges, we design an approach, which assists developers with understanding and debugging data processing in Spark. Our approach leverages statistical sampling to minimize performance overhead, and provides intermediate information and hint messages for each data processing step of a chained method pipeline. The preliminary evaluation of our approach shows that it has low performance overhead and we receive good feedback from developers.