An Approach for Detecting Execution Phases of a System for the Purpose of Program Comprehension

Understanding the behavioural aspects of a software system is an important activity in many software engineering activities including program comprehension and reverse engineering. The behaviour of software is typically represented in the form of execution traces. Traces, however, tend to be considerably large which makes analyzing their content a complex task. There is a need for trace simplification techniques that can help software engineers make sense of the content of a trace despite the trace being massive. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that aims to simplify the analysis of a large trace by detecting the execution phases that compose it. An example of a phase could be an initialization phase, a specific computation, etc. Our algorithm processes a trace generated from running the program under study and divides it into phases that can be later used by software engineers to understand where and why a particular computation appears. We also show the effectiveness of our approach through a case study.