ProFit – Performing Dynamic Analysis of Software Systems

Dynamic analysis offers the possibility of studying software at runtime, documenting its internal behavior. This dynamic information about the software is very interesting for the purpose of identifying many aspects of its operation, such as detection of dead code, security problems, complexity, and so on. However, not all software systems have the capacity to generate detailed information about what happens at runtime. It is with that consideration in mind that in this work we present ProFit, an environment conceived to improve software with the capacity to generate dynamic information about its execution, thus complementing the static analysis that can be performed on it. ProFit implements two strategies for such purpose: (i) instrumentation of the source code, through the insertion of sentences that generate execution traces in log files, and (ii) automatic generation of aspects for the generation of execution traces. None of those strategies produces any alteration in the behavior of the software, so the information generated truly reflects what happens during the software execution. Finally, the execution logs are represented by means of a tree-like structure that makes it quite easy to implement several kinds of analysis on it