Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Towards anomaly comprehension
T2 - 5th ACM Symposium on Software Visualization
AU - Lin, Shen
AU - Taiani, Francois
AU - Ormerod, Thomas C.
AU - Ball, Linden J.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Developers must often diagnose anomalies in programs they only have a partial knowledge of. As a result, they must simultaneously reverse engineer parts of the system they are unfamiliar with while interpreting dynamic observation data (performance profiling traces, error-propagation channels, memory leaks), a task particularly difficult. To support developers in this kind of comprehension task, filtering and aggregation have long been suggested as key enabling strategies. Unfortunately, traditional approaches typically only provide a uniform level of aggregation, thus limiting the ability of developers to construct context-dependent representations of a program's execution. In this paper, we propose a localised approach to navigate and analyse the CPU usage of little-known programs and libraries. Our method exploits the structural information present in profiling call trees to selectively raise or lower the local abstraction level of the performance data. We explain the formalism underpinning our approach, describe a prototype, and present a preliminary user study that shows our tool has the potential to complement more traditional navigation approaches.
AB - Developers must often diagnose anomalies in programs they only have a partial knowledge of. As a result, they must simultaneously reverse engineer parts of the system they are unfamiliar with while interpreting dynamic observation data (performance profiling traces, error-propagation channels, memory leaks), a task particularly difficult. To support developers in this kind of comprehension task, filtering and aggregation have long been suggested as key enabling strategies. Unfortunately, traditional approaches typically only provide a uniform level of aggregation, thus limiting the ability of developers to construct context-dependent representations of a program's execution. In this paper, we propose a localised approach to navigate and analyse the CPU usage of little-known programs and libraries. Our method exploits the structural information present in profiling call trees to selectively raise or lower the local abstraction level of the performance data. We explain the formalism underpinning our approach, describe a prototype, and present a preliminary user study that shows our tool has the potential to complement more traditional navigation approaches.
KW - program comprehension
KW - performance profiling
U2 - 10.1145/1879211.1879228
DO - 10.1145/1879211.1879228
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
SN - 978-1-4503-0494-8
SP - 103
EP - 112
BT - SOFTVIS '10 Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization
PB - ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY
CY - NEW YORK
Y2 - 25 October 2010 through 26 October 2010
ER -