Execution Trace Abstraction Based on Meta Patterns Usage

Visualizing object interactions in an execution trace with a sequence diagram is a promising technique for helping developers to comprehend effectively the behavior of an object-oriented system. However, in most cases, the reverse-engineered sequence diagram, which is automatically generated from an execution trace, contains enormous amounts of information, which causes scalability issues. In this paper, we present a method that abstracts the history of object interactions based on Pree´s meta patterns usage. We identify objects that are strongly related to each other by focusing on the relation of template-hook structures which are often used in object-oriented programming. Grouping the strongly correlated objects, we visualize the system´s behavior in terms of intergroup interactions with a sequence diagram. The sequence diagram that is generated is helpful for grasping the big picture of the overall behavior of the system, and so is a valuable aid for program comprehension. In this research, we implemented a tool to visualize the history of object interactions based on our proposed method and demonstrated the feasibility of our proposed method. We applied the tool to three kinds of open-source software systems and evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed method in program comprehension tasks.