System Evolution Tracking through Execution Trace Analysis

Software evolution analysis is concerned with analysis of artifacts produced during a software systems life-cycle. Execution traces produced from instrumented code reflect a system’s actual implementation. This information can be used to recover interaction patterns between different entities such as methods, files, or modules. Some solutions for detection of patterns and their visualization exist, but are limited to small amounts of data and are incapable of comparing data from different versions of a large software system. In this paper, we propose a methodology to analyze and compare the execution traces of different versions of a software system to provide insights into its evolution. We recover high-level module views that facilitate the comprehension of each module’s evolution. Our methodology allows us to track the evolution of particular modules and present the findings in three different kinds of visualizations. Based on these graphical representations, the evolution o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IWPC
• Authors: Michael Fischer, Johann Oberleitner, Harald Gall, Thomas Gschwind
• Keywords: Execution Traces, IWPC 2005, Software Engineering, Software Evolution Analysis, Software System