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 context is Extravis, a tool for the visualization of large traces. While many such tools have been evaluated through case studies, there have been no quantitative evaluations to the present day. This paper reports on the first controlled experiment to quantitatively measure the added value of trace visualization for program comprehension. We designed eight typical tasks aimed at gaining an understanding of a representative subject system, and measured how a control group (using the Eclipse IDE) and an experimental group (using both Eclipse and Extravis) performed these tasks in terms of time spent and solution correctness. The results are statistically significant in both regards, showing a 22 percent decrease in time requirements and a 43 percent increase in correctness for the group using trace visualization.

In practice, many people have to work together to develop and maintain a software system. However, the programmer’s key tool, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is a solo-tool, serving to help individual programmers understand and modify the system. Such an IDE does not leverage the knowledge other team members may have of the design and implementation of the system. We propose to resolve this problem by exploring, experimentally, new ways of inferring knowledge from past IDE-interactions, and of maximizing collaboration among developers. Our approach, called ADINDA, revolves around transforming the IDE into a set of integrated services, accessible via a web browser, and enriched with Web 2.0 technologies. Such services will not only help developers perform traditional IDE tasks, but also facilitate the required informal communication and collaboration needs of software development projects. In this paper, we report on our vision, approach and challenges for building ADINDA, and initial results.

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 the last decade. These efforts have resulted in a large research body of which currently there exists no comprehensive overview. This paper reports on a systematic literature survey aimed at the identification and structuring of research on program comprehension through dynamic analysis. From a research body consisting of 4,795 articles published in 14 relevant venues between July 1999 and June 2008 and the references therein, we have systematically selected 176 articles and characterized them in terms of four main facets: activity, target, method, and evaluation. The resulting overview offers insight in what constitutes the main contributions of the field, supports the task of identifying gaps and opportunities, and has motivated our discussion of several important research directions that merit additional consideration in the near future.