Understanding the database manipulation behavior of programs

Abstract

Due to the lack of (up-do-date) documentation, software maintenance and evolution processes often necessitate the recovery of a sucient understanding of the software system, before the latter can be adapted to new or changing requirements. To address this problem, several program comprehension techniques have been proposed to support this preliminary phase of software maintenance and evolution. Nevertheless, those techniques generally fail in gaining a complete and accurate understanding in the case of modern data-intensive systems, which are characterized by complex, dynamic and continuous interactions between the application programs and their database. In particular, understanding the database manipulation behavior of a given program involves dierent levels of comprehension ranging from identifying to relating and interpreting the successive database access operations. In this paper, we present our early research achievements in the development of a tool-supported framework aiming to extract and understand the database manipulation behavior of data-intensive programs.