Science of Computer Programming
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Dynamic analysis has long been a subject of study in the context of (compiler) optimization, program comprehension, test coverage, etc. Ever-since, the scale of the event trace has been an important issue. This scalability issue finds its limits on the computational front, where time and/or space complexity of algorithms become too large to be handled by a computer, but also on the cognitive front, where the results presented to the user become too large to be easily understood. This research focusses on delivering a number of program comprehension solutions that help software engineers to focus on the software system during their initial program exploration and comprehension phases. The key concepts we use in our techniques are "frequency of execution" and runtime "coupling". To validate our techniques we used a number of open-source software systems, as well as an industrial legacy application.