On the Use of Execution Trace Alignment for Driving Perfective Changes

Perfective changes in well-established software systems are easier to perform when the development team has a solid understanding of the internals. However, it is reasonable to assume that the use of an open source system to incorporate new features and obtain a new software product is an appealing approach instead of coding a new product from scratch. Considering this scenario, and considering that it is not uncommon that systems are poorly documented, there is no widely accepted approach to guide the perfective maintenance for developers with low understanding of the system. This work proposes a new method based on the analysis of execution traces for locating evolution points in the source code where changes should be performed. The proposed method was evaluated with three open source systems and the conclusion suggests a significant impact on effort reduction.