Deursen. Understanding execution traces using massive sequence and circular bundle views

The use of dynamic information to aid in software un-derstanding is a common practice nowadays. One of the many approaches concerns the comprehension of execution traces. A major issue in this context is scalability: due to the vast amounts of information, it is a very difficult task to suc-cessfully find your way through such traces without getting lost. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel trace visu-alization method based on a massive sequence and circular bundle view, constructed with scalability in mind. By means of three usage scenarios that were conducted on three dif-ferent software systems, we show how our approach, imple-mented in a tool called EXTRAVIS, is applicable to the ar-eas of trace exploration, feature location, and feature com-prehension. 1