Visualizing Similarities in Execution Traces

The analysis of execution traces is a common practice in the context of software understanding. A major issue during this task is scalability, as the massive amounts of data often make the comprehension process difficult. A significant portion of this data overload can be attributed to repetitions that are caused by, for example, iterations in the software’s source code. In this position paper, we elaborate on a novel approach to visualize such repetitions. The idea is to compare an execution trace against itself and to visualize the matching events in a two-dimensional matrix, similar to related work in the field of code duplication detection. By revealing these similarities we hope to gain new insights into execution traces. We identify the potential purposes in facilitating the software understanding process and report on our findings so far.