Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

Method Execution Reports: Generating Text and Visualization to Describe Program Behavior

Author(s):

Beck, Fabian; Siddiqui, Hafiz Ammar; Bergel, Alexandre; Weiskopf, Daniel

Title of Anthology:

Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization

pages:

1-10

Publisher:

IEEE

Publication Date:

2017

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

doi:10.1109/VISSOFT.2017.14

Fulltext:

Method Execution Reports: Generating Text and Visualization to Describe Program Behavior (659 KB)

Citation:

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Abstract

To obtain an accurate understanding of a program behavior, developers use a set of tools and techniques such as logging outputs, debuggers, profilers, and visualizations. These support an in-depth analysis of the program behavior, each approach focusing on a different aspect. What is missing, however, is an approach to get an overview of a program execution. As a first step to fill this gap, this paper presents an approach to generate Method Execution Reports. Each report summarizes the execution of a selected method for a specific execution of the program using natural-language text and embedded visualizations. A report provides an overview of the dynamic calls and time consumption related to the selected method. We present a framework to generate these reports and discuss the specific instantiation and phrasing we have chosen. Our results comprise feedback from developers discussing the understandability and usefulness of our approach and a task-based comparison to state-of-the-art solutions.