Systematic modeling of workflows in trace-based software debugging and optimization

Tracing is a tool frequently used in the debugging and optimization of software. While there exist different tracing solutions, each of them comes as a tightly coupled trace collection, analysis and visualization bundle, and thus, it can only be used to answer a narrow range of questions. Due to this limitation and the complex nature of software workflow in the embedded domain, we believe that tracing and the analysis of traces have to be flexible and extensible. In this paper, we propose a methodology of trace processing. We introduce a generic model of describing traces and operations that are performed on them, irrespective of the tracing solutions being used. Also, with the help of our model, one can describe new processes and workflows that involve trace data from a combination of sources. To present the use of our methodology, we systematically model four use cases that solve complex debugging and analysis tasks. At the end, we show how one of these use cases fits into a modular framework using a prototype implementation