An Approach for Tracing and Understanding Asynchronous Systems

Poster

Abstract: Applications built in a strongly decoupled, event-based interaction style have many commendable characteristics, including ease of dynamic configuration, accommodation of platform heterogeneity, and ease of distribution over a network. It is not always easy, however, to humanly grasp the dynamic behavior of such applications, since many threads are active and events are asynchronously (and profusely) transmitted. We present a set of requirements for an aid to assist in the human understanding and exploration of the behavior of such applications through the incremental refinement of the basis for determining causality relationships between messages and events sent to or from black- and white-box components. A prototype tool is demonstrated, indicating viable approaches to meeting requirements. Experience with the tool reinforces some of the requirements and indicates others.

Bio: Scott Hendrickson is a member of the Institute for Software Research and is a second-year Ph.D. student in the School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. His research interests lie in software architecture, particularly component-based architectural composition. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from UC Irvine in 2002.