Visualizing an Execution Trace as a Compact Sequence Diagram Using Dominance Algorithms

Visualizing an execution trace of an object-oriented system as sequence diagrams is effective to understand the behavior of the system. However, sequence diagrams extracted from an execution trace are too large for developers to inspect since a trace involves a large number of objects and method calls. To support developers to understand extracted sequence diagrams, it is necessary to remove the less important details of the diagrams. In this paper, we apply a dominance algorithm to a dynamic call graph among objects in order to detect and remove local objects contributing to internal behavior of dominator objects. The case study shows our approach automatically removed about 40 percent of the objects from execution traces on average.

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