Title:	EVALUATING INSTRUMENTATION STRATEGIES BY PROGRAM SIMULATION
Author(s):	Roberto Andrioli de Araujo, Anthony Accioly, Felipe Albuquerque, Marcos L. Chaim
ISBN:	978-989-8533-06-7
Editors:	Hans Weghorn, Leonardo Azevedo and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2011
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Instrumentation strategies; Program analysis tool; Data-flow testing coverage analysis; Experimentation in software engineering
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	3
Last Page:	10
Language:	English
Cover:
Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Program instrumentation is mandatory in several software engineering tasks such as program debugging and testing. It consists of inserting additional code (probes) to collect information at run-time. The instrumented program is invariably slower and utilizes more memory than the original program. One important issue is to identify instrumentation strategies that minimize such side effects. Nevertheless, this is a rather expensive task because it requires that all strategies be implemented in a common platform of hardware and software. We present a novel low-cost approach to perform comparisons among instrumentation strategies. It is based on an engine (called InSS – Instrumentation Strategies Simulator) that simulates the execution of a program. The InSS provides measures of time which allow comparing the execution of programs instrumented with different strategies. As an example of the framework’s usefulness, we evaluate three instrumentation strategies to support data-flow testing. The InSS data provided valuable insights on how such strategies perform at run-time. Additionally, the effort to implement a new strategy using the InSS is low—few hundreds of lines of code in Java language.
	Go Back