Understanding Execution Traces Using Massive Sequence and Circular Bundle Views

Report (2007)
Department
Software Technology (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2007 The authors. Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology.
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

26-06-2007

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2007-009

ISSN:

1872-5392

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Abstract

The use of dynamic information to aid in software understanding is a common practice nowadays. One of the many approaches concerns the comprehension of execution traces. A major issue in this context is scalability: due to the vast amounts of information, it is a very difficult task to successfully find your way through such traces without getting lost. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel trace visualization method based on a massive sequence and circular bundle view, constructed with scalability in mind. By means of three usage scenarios that were conducted on three different software systems, we show how our approach, implemented in a tool called EXTRAVIS, is applicable to the areas of trace exploration, feature location, and feature comprehension. Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2007, IEEE Computer Society, June 26-29, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada.