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Selected publications by date
Selected publications by category
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Gammatella: Visualizing Program-Execution Data for Deployed Software
Palgrave Macmillan Information Visualization
Volume 3, Number 3, pp. 173-188.
James A. Jones, Alessandro Orso, and Mary Jean Harrold
Abstract
Software systems are often released with missing
functionality, errors, or incompatibilities that may
result in failures in the field, inferior performances,
or, more generally, user dissatisfaction. In previous
work, some of the authors presented the Gamma approach,
whose goal is to improve software quality by augmenting
software-engineering tasks with dynamic information
collected from deployed software. The Gamma
approach enables analyses that (1) rely on actual field
data instead of synthetic in-house data and (2) leverage
the vast and heterogeneous resources of an entire user
community instead of limited, and often homogeneous,
in-house resources.
When monitoring a large number of deployed instances of a
software product, however, a significant amount of data is
collected. Such raw data are useless in the absence of
suitable data-mining and visualization techniques that
support exploration and understanding of the data. In this
paper, we present a new technique for collecting, storing,
and visualizing program-execution data gathered from
deployed instances of a software product. We also present
a prototype toolset, Gammatella, that implements
the technique. Finally, we show how the visualization
capabilities of Gammatella facilitate effective
investigation of several kinds of execution-related
information in an interactive fashion, and discuss our
initial experience with a semi-public display of
Gammatella.
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