The use of program profiling for software maintenance with applications to the year 2000 problem

This paper describes new techniques to help with testing and debugging, using information obtained from path profiling. A path profiler instruments a program so that the number of times each different loop-free path executes is accumulated during an execution run. With such an instrumented program, each run of the program generates a path spectrum for the execution—a distribution of the paths that were executed during that run. A path spectrum is a finite, easily obtainable characterization of a program's execution on a dataset, and provides a behavior signature for a run of the program.