Instrumenting time-sensitive software for feature location

Feature location is a commonly occurring program comprehension problem. In understanding large software systems, software engineers need to locate the different software components that work together to provide a specific end user feature. Several dynamic analysis methods for feature location have been proposed in the literature. These generally require instrumenting the software to trace execution. However our industrial experience indicates that instrumenting can be problematic for large time-sensitive systems. This paper describes our experience and experiments with "mininst", a low-impact instrumentation approach oriented to feature location. We hope that this approach will enable the application of dynamic analysis feature location methods to this class of time-sensitive software.