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A metamodel for the compact but lossless exchange of execution traces

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Abstract

Understanding the behavioural aspects of a software system can be made easier if efficient tool support is provided. Lately, there has been an increase in the number of tools for analysing execution traces. These tools, however, have different formats for representing execution traces, which hinders interoperability and limits reuse and sharing of data. To allow for better synergies among trace analysis tools, it would be beneficial to develop a standard format for exchanging traces. In this paper, we present a graph-based format, called compact trace format (CTF), which we hope will lead the way towards such a standard. CTF can model traces generated from a variety of programming languages, including both object-oriented and procedural ones. CTF is built with scalability in mind to overcome the vast size of most interesting traces. Indeed, the design of CTF is based on the idea that call trees can be transformed into more compact ordered acyclic directed graphs by representing similar subtrees only once. CTF is also supported by our trace analysis tool SEAT (Software Exploration and Analysis Tool).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj

  2. School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Timothy C. Lethbridge

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  1. Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj
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  2. Timothy C. Lethbridge
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Correspondence to Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj.

Additional information

Communicated by Tony Clark and Jorn Bettin.

This paper is a significant extension of a paper presented at the first International Workshop on Meta-models and Schemas for Reverse Engineering (ATEM), 2003 and published as “A Metamodel for Dynamic Information of Object-Oriented Systems” by ENTCS 2004.

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Hamou-Lhadj, A., Lethbridge, T.C. A metamodel for the compact but lossless exchange of execution traces. Softw Syst Model 11, 77–98 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-010-0180-x

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