Correlating features and code using a compact two-sided trace analysis approach

Software developers are constantly required to modify and adapt application features in response to changing requirements. The problem is that just by reading the source code, it is difficult to determine how classes and methods contribute to the runtime behavior of features. Moreover, dependencies between system features are not obvious, consequently software maintenance operations often result in unintended side effects. To tackle these problems, we propose a compact feature-driven approach (i.e., summarized trace information) based on dynamic analysis to characterize features and computational units of an application. We extract execution traces to achieve an explicit mapping between features and classes using two complementary perspectives. We apply our approach to two case studies and we report our findings.