Pattern-based trace correlation technique to compare software versions

Authors:
Maher Idris;Ali Mehrabian;Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj;Richard Khoury
Affiliations:
Software Behaviour Analysis Lab, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada;Software Behaviour Analysis Lab, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada;Software Behaviour Analysis Lab, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada;Department of Software Engineering, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada
Venue:
AIS'12 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Autonomous and Intelligent Systems
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Understanding the behavioural aspects and functional attributes of an existing software system is an important enabler for many software engineering activities including software maintenance and evolution. In this paper, we focus on understanding the differences between subsequent versions of the same system. This allows software engineers to compare the implementation of software features in different versions of the same system so as to estimate the effort required to maintain and test new versions. Our approach consists of exercising the features under study, generate the corresponding execution traces, and compare them to uncover similarities and differences. We propose in this paper to compare feature traces based on their main behavioural patterns instead of a mere event-to-event mapping. Two trace correlation metrics are also proposed and which vary whether the frequency of the patterns is taken into account or not. We show the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to traces generated from an open source object-oriented system.