A Discovery Method for Hierarchical Software Execution Behavior Models Based on Components

Abstract

Software is rapidly evolving and operates in a changing environment; therefore, in addition to software design and testing, it is essential to observe and understand the software execution behavior by modeling data recorded during the execution of the software to improve its reliability. The nested call relationship between methods during the execution of software is common, but most process-mining methods are unable to discover them, only generating flat models with low fitness. Meanwhile, it is easy to generate “spaghetti-like” models with low comprehensibility when dealing with complex software execution data. This paper proposes a component-based hierarchical software behavior model discovery method that can discover hierarchical nested call structures during software runtime, improving the fitness of the model; meanwhile, the proposed method partitions the discovery model into several parts by component information to improve the comprehensibility of the model, which can also reflect the interaction behavior within and between components. The proposed approach was implemented in a process mining toolkit. Using real-life software event logs and public datasets, we demonstrated that compared with other advanced process mining techniques, our approach can visualize actual software execution behavior in a more accurate and easy-to-understand way while balancing time performance.