What is my program doing? Program dynamics in programmer's terms

Abstract

Programmers need to understand their systems. They need to understand how their systems work and why they fail; why they perform well or poorly, and when the systems are behaving abnormally. Much of this involves understanding the dynamic behavior of complex software systems. These systems can involve multiple processes and threads, thousands of classes, and millions of lines of code. These systems are designed to run continuously, often running for months at a time. We consider the problem of using dynamic analysis and visualization to help programmers achieve the necessary understanding. To be effective this needs to be done on running applications with minimal overhead and in the high-level terms programmers use to think about their system. After going over past efforts in this area we look at our current work and then present a number of challenges for the future. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.