SCAN: An Approach to Label and Relate Execution Trace Segments

Identifying concepts in execution traces is a task often necessary to support program comprehension or maintenance activities. Several approaches -- static, dynamic or hybrid -- have been proposed to identify cohesive, meaningful sequence of methods in execution traces. However, none of the proposed approaches is able to label such segments and to identify relations between segments of the same trace. This paper present SCAN (Segment Concept AssigNer) an approach to assign labels to sequences of methods in execution traces, and to identify relations between such segments. SCAN uses information retrieval methods and formal concept analysis to produce sets of words helping the developer to understand the concept implemented by a segment. Specifically, formal concept analysis allows SCAN to discover commonalities between segments in different trace areas, as well as terms more specific to a given segment and high level relations between segments. The paper describes SCAN along with a preliminary manual validation -- upon execution traces collected from usage scenarios of JHotDraw and ArgoUML -- of SCAN accuracy in assigning labels representative of concepts implemented by trace segments.