Dynamic analysis of program concepts in Java

Abstract

Concept assignment identifies units of source code that are functionally related, even if this is not apparent from a syntactic point of view. Until now, the results of concept assignment have only been used for static analysis, mostly of program source code. This paper investigates the possibility of using concept information as part of dynamic analysis of programs. There are two case studies involving (i) a small Java program used in a previous research study; (ii) a large Java virtual machine (the popular Jikes RVM system). These studies demonstrate the usefulness of concept information for dynamic approaches to profiling, debugging and comprehension. This paper also introduces the new idea of feedback-directed concept assignment.

Visualized adaptive runtime subsystems

“…This VM is adapted so that it dumps out profiling information for the amount of time spent in the different adaptive runtime subsystems. The instrumentation required to produce runtime profiling information can be inserted using techniques like static aspect weaving and concept assignment [Singer and Kirkham 2006]. After an execution run with the instrumented VM, we postprocess the trace file to produce the visualization of VARS behaviour.…”