Research Track "Incident Management"

PhD Candidate: Eileen Kapel
Track leader: Luís Cruz, Diomidis Spinellis

Ensuring the reliability of changes deployment is essential to prevent incidents in businesses that strongly depend on software and services. Incidents should be avoided since they may lead to customer dissatisfaction, financial losses and reputational damage. Currently, the majority of outages are being caused by changes, so we believe there is a need for a higher focus on the risk management pre-change deployment.

This track relates to a risk management AIOps framework utilising real-world change, CI/CD pipeline and incident data for incident prevention through reliable changes deployment. This research explores

obtaining background information on the current state of practice of service management with a case study on a software-defined business;
a risk management AIOps framework that utilises the traces of change, incident and CI/CD pipeline code for predicting the risk of changes deployment; and
testing the generalisability of the framework for reducing the risk of change deployment.

Selected publications

On the Difficulty of Identifying Incident-Inducing Changes. Eileen Kapel, Luis Cruz, Diomidis Spinellis, Arie Van Deursen. Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP), 2024. Preprint.
Enhancing Incident Management: Insights from a Case Study at ING. Eileen Kapel, Luís Cruz, Diomidis Spinellis, Arie Van Deursen. Proceedings of the 1st IEEE/ACM Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges in Financial Firms (FinanSE), 2024. DOI: 10.1145/3643665.3648048.
Incident Prevention Through Reliable Changes Deployment. Eileen Kapel. IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion), 2023. Poster. DOI: 10.1109/ICSE-Companion58688.2023.00055.
Kapel, Eileen and Cruz, Luís and Spinellis, Diomidis and van Deursen, Arie, Incident Management in a Software-Defined Business: A Case Study. SSRN abstract 4333515.
Ching-Chi Chuang, Luís Cruz, Robbert van Dalen, Vladimir Mikovski, Arie van Deursen: Removing dependencies from large software projects: are you really sure? SCAM 2022: 105-115 (link).