Abstract—When trying to understand a system that is based on the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), it is typically not enough to understand the individual services in the architecture, but also the interactions between the services. In this paper, we present a technique based on dynamic analysis that can be used to obtain insight into how services work together to perform overall business functionality. In particular, our technique connects traces from individual services together, so that the user can obtain a global understanding of how the entire SOA works. I.

Abstract—Unit and integration tests can be invaluable during software maintenance as they help to understand pieces of code, they help with quality assurance and they build up confidence amongst developers. Unfortunately then, previous research has shown that unit tests do not always co-evolve nicely with the production code, thus leaving the software vulnerable. This paper presents TestNForce, a tool that helps developers to identify the unit tests that need to be altered and executed after a code change, thereby reducing the effort needed to keep the unit tests in sync with the changes to the production code. In order to evaluate TestNForce, we perform a user study that evaluates the adequacy, usefulness and completeness of TestNForce ⋆. I.

Ajax-enabled web applications are a new breed of highly interactive, highly dynamic web applications. Although Ajax allows developers to create rich web applications, Ajax applications can be difficult to comprehend and thus to maintain. For this reason, we have created FireDetective, a tool that uses dynamic analysis at both the client (browser) and server-side to facilitate the understanding of Ajax applications. We evaluate FireDetective using (1) a pretest-posttest user study and (2) a field user study. Preliminary evidence shows that the FireDetective tool is an effective aid for web developers striving to understand Ajax applications. 1

Abstract—Through their dynamic and loosely coupled nature, service-oriented architectures (SOA) are ideal for realizing runtime evolvable systems. However, runtime evolution demands proper understanding of the configuration of SOA-based software systems over time. In order to keep system disturbance as low as possible while replacing existing services with their newer versions, engineers require an adequate illustration of how the connections and dependencies of services change in the running system. That way, they can identify the most appropriate point in SOA-based systems ’ operation time for maintenance. In this paper, we make use of the runtime topology to help software engineers understand SOA-based systems, and we describe a tool, Serviz, that visualizes how services are activated, and how much they interact over time. A user study demonstrates to which extent the runtime topology can support the analysis and understanding of SOA-based software systems. I.