Feature-level phase detection for execution trace using object cache

  • Authors:

  • Yui Watanabe;Takashi Ishio;Katsuro Inoue

  • Affiliations:

  • Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan;Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan;Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan

  • Venue:
  • WODA '08 Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on dynamic analysis: held in conjunction with the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2008)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Visualizing collaborations of objects is important for developers understanding and debugging an object-oriented program. Many techniques and tools are proposed to visualize dynamic collaborations involved in an execution trace of a system, however, an execution trace may be too large to be transformed into a single diagram. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to efficiently detecting phases, or high-level behavioral units described in a use-case scenario. Our idea is based on the nature of object-oriented programming; a phase starts with preparing objects for the phase and ends with destroying temporary objects. Our technique uses a LRU cache for observing a working set of objects, and interprets a sharp rise in the frequency of the cache update as a phase transition. We have applied our approach to two industrial applications and found that our approach is promising to visualize a phase corresponding to a feature as a sequence diagram.