Quantitative Evaluation of Software Component Behavior Discovery Approach

Abstract

During the execution of software systems, their execution data can be recorded. By fully exploiting these data, software practitioners can discover behavioral models describing the actual execution of the underlying software system. The recorded unstructured software execution data may be too complex, spanning over several days, etc. Applying existing discovery techniques results in spaghetti-like models with no clear structure and no valuable information for comprehension. Starting from the observation that a software system is composed of a set of logical components, Liu et al. propose to decompose the software behavior discovery problem into smaller independent ones by discovering a behavioral model per component in [1]. However, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is not fully evaluated and compared with existing approaches. In this paper, we evaluate the quality (in terms of understandability/complexity) of discovered component behavior models in a quantitative manner. Based on evaluation, we show that this approach can reduce the complexity of the discovered model and gives a better understanding.