Program comprehension is an important activity in software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. The study of a program’s execution, known as dynamic analysis, has become a common technique in this respect and has received substantial attention from the research community, particularly over the last decade. These efforts have resulted in

Abstract—Software maintenance tasks, such as testing and program understanding, can benefit from formal specifications that describe how a program should use an API. Recently, there has been increasing interest in specification miners that automatically extract finite state specifications of method ordering constraints from existing software. However, comparing different mining approaches is difficult, because no common ground to evaluate the effectiveness of specification miners has been established yet. We present a framework for evaluating to which extent specification miners find valid finite state descriptions of API usage constraints. The framework helps in creating reference specifications and includes metrics to compare mined specifications to the reference specifications. The metrics are tailored for evaluating specification miners and account for imprecision and incompleteness in mined specifications. We use the framework to compare the effectiveness of three mining approaches and to show their respective benefits.

Abstract—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. Using an exploratory pre-experimental user study, we see that web developers encounter problems when understanding Ajax applications. We also find preliminary evidence that the FireDetective tool allows web developers to understand Ajax applications more effectively, more efficiently and with more confidence ★. I.

The highly dynamic and loosely coupled nature of a serviceoriented software system leads to the challenge of understanding it. In order to obtain insight into the runtime topology of a SOA system, we propose a framework-based runtime monitoring approach to trace the service interactions during execution. The approach can be transparently applied to all web services built on the framework and reuses parts of information and functionality already available in the framework to achieve our goals. Categories and Subject Descriptors

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. FireDetective aims to facilitate the understanding of Ajax applications. It uses dynamic analysis at both the client (browser) and server side and subsequently connects both traces for further analysis.