Method and Apparatus for Downsizing the Diagnosis Scope for Change-Inducing Errors

The scope of the system changes to be considered for analysis for finding problematic changes is reduced in order to allow focusing on highly potential suspicious drifts caused by change sequences. The method and system includes a data cleaning module to remove irrelevant changes, a feature extraction and normalization module to extract the features of change objects, data annotation module to remove irrelevant changes based on patterns, and a clustering module to obtain groups for further analysis. Data cleaning is simplified using domain independent rules. Additional sources of change sequences are removed by application of pattern based techniques so as to narrow down problematic system changes to analyze for root cause analysis. Change error sequence and degree of temporal correlation to correlate system changes with errors, as well as change behavior patterns may be used for downsizing the diagnosis scope.