A hierarchy of dynamic software views: from object-interactions to feature-interactions

Abstract

This work presents a hierarchy of dynamic views that is constructed using tools that analyze program execution traces. At the highest-level of abstraction are the feature-interaction and implementation views, which track the inter-feature dependencies as well as the classes that implement these features. At the middle-level is the class-interaction view, which is an abstract view of the object-interactions. The object-interaction view is the base view for all the views, and captures the low-level runtime interactions between objects. Two case studies are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our work.