DEPLOYED SOFTWARE ANALYSIS

Profiling can offer a valuable characterization of software behavior. The richer the characterization is, the more effective the client analyses are in supporting quality assurance activities. For today’s complex software, however, obtaining a rich charac-terization with the input provided by in-house test suites is becoming more difficult and expensive. Extending the profiling activity to deployed environments can mit-igate this shortcoming by exposing more program behavior reflecting real software usage. To make profiling of deployed software plausible, however, we need to take into consideration that there are fundamental differences between the development and the deployed environments. Deployed environments allow for less overhead, pro-vide less control for engineers to perform profiling adjustments, and generate high volumes of information that may be overwhelming and often irrelevant to the client analyses. These characteristics make existing techniques to support in-house profilin