Techniques for Visualizing Software Execution

of the RPE Techniques for Visualizing Software Execution by Justin Seyster Stony Brook University March 2008 Instrumenting or profiling a program’s execution yields eno rm us amounts of data that the programmer can use to diagnose bugs and performance problems or even exp lore how a program works. However, the raw data is often too vast for any programmer to analyze unaid ed. The goal of execution visualization is to present that data visually in a way that allows the viewe r to better understand a program’s behavior and to draw conclusions about that behavior. This paper surv eys tools that visualize program executions by graphing data from execution traces, showing the steps of the program’s execution, or displaying the contents of runtime data structures. We evaluate the techni ques these tools use based on how much data they show with static displays, animations, and interactiv e queries and how clearly that data communicates information the user is looking for. We also examine the avai l bility of these techniques in production software visualization packages. As part of our survey, we p resent our own system that visualizes output from the Memcov memory profiler to aid in identifying sources of leaky or wasteful memory allocations. Finally, we explore the types of data generated by program ex ecutions and discuss displays that are effective for each. This work was partially made possible thanks to a Computer Sy stems Research NSF award (CNS-0509230) and an NSF CAREER award in the Next Generation Software program (EIA-

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