A controlled experiment for program comprehension through trace visualization

Accepted version for publication in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Software maintenance activities require a sufficient level of understanding of the software at hand that unfortunately is not always readily available. Execution trace visualization is a common approach in gaining this understanding, and among our own efforts in this...

A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis

Program comprehension is an important activity in software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. The study of a program's execution, known as dynamic analysis, has become a common technique in this respect and has received substantial attention from the research community, particularly over...

Execution Trace Analysis through Massive Sequence and Circular Bundle Views

Preprint of article published in: Journal of Systems and Software (Elsevier), 81 (12), 2008; doi:10.1016/j.jss.2008.02.068 An important part of many software maintenance tasks is to gain a sufficient level of understanding of the system at hand. The use of dynamic information to aid in this software understanding process is a common practice...

A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis

Preprint of paper published in: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 35 (5), 2009; doi:10.1109/TSE.2009.28 Program comprehension is an important activity in software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. The study of a program's execution, known as dynamic analysis, has become a common...

On Large Execution Traces and Trace Abstraction Techniques

Preprint of paper published in: Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution (Wiley), 2008 Program comprehension is an important concern in the context of software maintenance tasks because these activities generally require a certain degree of knowledge of the system at hand. Although the use of dynamic analysis for information gathering has...