Feature-level phase detection for execution trace using object cache
Yui Watanabe, Takashi Ishio, Katsuro Inoue · 2008
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.