Recovering Problem Structures from Execution Traces

Software systems evolve in response to changes in stake-holder requirements. Lack of documentation about the orig-inal system can make it difficult to analyze and implement new requirements. Although automatic recovery of all re-quirements from an implementation is usually not possible, we suggest that the recovery of problem structures, which in turn inform the problem analysis of new requirements, is feasible and useful. In this paper, we propose the tool-supported approach to recover and maintain structures of problems, solutions, and their relationships, by recovering causal control and data dependencies between components. Extracting low-level program structures is done fully auto-matically, while higher-level descriptions of problem struc-tures are obtained interactively. We validate our approach using a case study of a medium-sized open-source software system