The Dynamic Call Graph Matrix

Visualizing dynamic call graphs is typically done by providing a visual representation that shows the sequence of static graphs placed next to each other. Such a time-to-space mapping is useful to visually compare the graphs and to see the changing graph structure, but, negatively, a view on changes between all pairs of graphs in the sequence is not provided and detecting similarities of longer call graph subsequences is not well supported. In this paper we describe the dynamic call graph matrix that shows similarities and differences between graph pairs in a graph sequence by applying certain well-known set operations as well as fine-grained and coarse-grained graph views supporting visual scalability. We illustrate the usefulness of our technique by applying it to dynamic call graph data from the open source software project JUnit that contains several inherent dynamic call graph features worth investigating and hard to find by a side-by-side dynamic graph visualization alone.

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