Software Evolution Aided by Execution Trace Alignment

Abstract

Several attempts to facilitate understanding the behavior of software systems have been proposed. Nonetheless, there is no widely accepted approach to facilitate understanding software systems with poor documentation with the goal that new developers could contribute with the evolution of these systems. The effort to understand complex systems may be a prohibitive factor in program comprehension tasks for many developers. This work proposes a new method based on the analysis of execution traces for locating points in the source code where changes that introduce new functionality should be performed. The proposed method was evaluated with a real world system, where new functionality were inserted with low effort.