Relational database approach for execution trace analysis

Software maintenance is an important part of software engineering life cycle especially in large software systems due to the size and complexity of typical traces. In fact, the changes made to the implementation of systems are usually not reflected in the design documentation and hence the gap between a system´s implementation and its design models becomes large. An essential step in software maintenance is to explore the content of large execution traces. The understanding of software structure can be simplified by choosing important information of execution traces files. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that improves program comprehension using relational database concepts.