Quality Properties of Execution Tracing, an Empirical Study Galli, Tamas Chiclana Parrilla, Francisco Siewe, Francois Quality assessment Quality properties Execution tracing Logging The authors are grateful to all the professionals who participated in the focus groups; moreover, they also express special thanks to the management of the companies involved for making the organisation of the focus groups possible. Data are made available in the appendix including the results of the data coding process. The quality of execution tracing impacts the time to a great extent to locate errors in software components; moreover, execution tracing is the most suitable tool, in the majority of the cases, for doing postmortem analysis of failures in the field. Nevertheless, software product quality models do not adequately consider execution tracing quality at present neither do they define the quality properties of this important entity in an acceptable manner. Defining these quality properties would be the first step towards creating a quality model for execution tracing. The current research fills this gap by identifying and defining the variables, i.e., the quality properties, on the basis of which the quality of execution tracing can be judged. The present study analyses the experiences of software professionals in focus groups at multinational companies, and also scrutinises the literature to elicit the mentioned quality properties. Moreover, the present study also contributes to knowledge with the combination of methods while computing the saturation point for determining the number of the necessary focus groups. Furthermore, to pay special attention to validity, in addition to the the indicators of qualitative research: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability, the authors also considered content, construct, internal and external validity. 2021-04-26T11:19:55Z 2021-04-26T11:19:55Z 2021-03-08 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Galli, T.; Chiclana, F.; Siewe, F. Quality Properties of Execution Tracing, an Empirical Study. Appl. Syst. Innov. 2021, 4, 20. [https://doi.org/10.3390/asi4010020] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/68114 10.3390/asi4010020 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License AtribuciĆ³n 3.0 EspaƱa MDPI