ALMOST: Exploring Program Traces

We built a tool to visualize and explore program execution traces. Our goal was to help programmers without any prior knowledge of a program, quickly get enough knowledge about its structure so that they can make small to medium changes. In the process, a number of problems were faced and tackled concerning the efficient use of screen space, interaction with multiple concurrent views, and linking of asymmetric views. 1 Overview When a programmer is trying to understand a program code, execution traces can be a useful source of information. However, in textual form it is almost impossible to read any but the most trivial traces; there is a need to visualize them. As a domain of data to be visualized, traces are quite specific: they are time series, they have no noise (all the data is significant), and they come from a process that is available (we always have the program, even if in machine code) and deterministic (modulo input, output, timing, and resource allocation, which can also...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: NPIV
• Authors: Manos Reniers, Steven P. Reis
• Keywords: Execution Traces, Multiple Concurrent Views, NPIV 1999, Program Execution Traces, Visualization