Quality Properties of Execution Tracing, an Empirical Study

Abstract

The quality of execution tracing impacts the time to a great extent to locate errors in software components; moreover, execution tracing is the most suitable tool, in the majority of the cases, for doing postmortem analysis of failures in the field. Nevertheless, software product quality models do not adequately consider execution tracing quality at present neither do they define the quality properties of this important entity in an acceptable manner. Defining these quality properties would be the first step towards creating a quality model for execution tracing. The current research fills this gap by identifying and defining the variables, i.e., the quality properties, on the basis of which the quality of execution tracing can be judged. The present study analyses the experiences of software professionals in focus groups at multinational companies, and also scrutinises the literature to elicit the mentioned quality properties. Moreover, the present study also contributes to knowledge with the combination of methods while computing the saturation point for determining the number of the necessary focus groups. Furthermore, to pay special attention to validity, in addition to the the indicators of qualitative research: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability, the authors also considered content, construct, internal and external validity.

Practical Consequences of Quality Views in Assessing Software Quality

“…The development team as responsible for the software's maintenance, in agreement with the stakeholders, includes the maintainability quality property with its analysability sub-property into the quality measurement and assessment process. They identify different publications [3,67,73] describing the Execution Tracing Quality, which can exactly be linked to the analysability quality property. Thus, the development team adds Execution Tracing Quality to the metrics that they measure for the external quality view.…”

Software Vulnerabilities’ Detection by Analysing Application Execution Traces

“…As for traces, they were used by the authors [13], [15], [14], [21], [22] and [23] in their work. The authors of the references [24], [25] [26] and [27] used traces to detect their code errors through debugging.…”

“…By combining the analysis of application execution traces with machine learning techniques, we aim to enhance malware detection. Previous studies have emphasized the significance and utility of traces in monitoring computer system behavior [11], [12], [13], [14], [15].…”