The Tracer
The Tracer is a prototype tool for scenario-based trace visualization and exploration.
The Tracer presents a rich and highly dynamic technique for analyzing, visualizing, and exploring the execution traces of reactive systems. The two inputs are a designer's inter-object scenario-based behavioral model, visually described using a UML2-compliant dialect of live sequence charts (LSC), and an execution trace of the system. Our method allows one to visualize, navigate through, and explore, the activation and progress of the scenarios as they "come to life" during execution. Thus, a concrete system's runtime is recorded and viewed through abstractions provided by behavioral models used for its design, tying the visualization and exploration of system execution traces to model-driven engineering. The Tracer supports both event-based and real-time-based tracing, and use details-on-demand mechanisms, multi-scaling grids, and gradient coloring methods. Novel model exploration techniques include semantics-based navigation, filtering, and trace comparison.
The Gantt views are implemented using the open source jaret timebars. We thank Peter Kliem for his support.
The first version of the Tracer prototype was designed and programmed by Asaf Kleinbort and Shahar Maoz (2007). A second major version was programmed by Evyatar Shoresh (2009).
The Tracer's gallery features screen captures from several case study applications.
More on the Tracer can be found in the references below. As of 2010, the Tracer is integrated into PlayGo.
References
- Shahar Maoz and David Harel: On tracing reactive systems. Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), 2010. DOI= 10.1007/s10270-010-0151-2
- Shahar Maoz: Using Model-Based Traces as Runtime Models. IEEE Computer 42(10): 28-36 (2009)
- Shahar Maoz: Model-Based Traces. MoDELS Workshops 2008: 109-119
- Shahar Maoz, Asaf Kleinbort, David Harel: Towards Trace Visualization and Exploration for Reactive Systems. VL/HCC 2007: 153-156
