In The Field Monitoring of Interactive Applications

Monitoring techniques can extract accurate data about the behavior of software systems. When used in the field, they can reveal how applications behave in real-world contexts and how programs are actually exercised by their users. Nevertheless, since monitoring might need significant storage and computational resources, it may interfere with users activities degrading the quality of the user experience. While the impact of monitoring has been typically studied by measuring the overhead that it may introduce in a monitored application, there is little knowledge about how monitoring solutions may actually impact on the user experience and to what extent users may recognize their presence. In this paper, we present our investigation on how collecting data in the field may impact the quality of the user experience. Our initial results show that non-trivial overhead can be tolerated by users, depending on the kind of activity that is performed. This opens interesting opportunities for research in monitoring solutions, which could be designed to opportunistically