research-article

A Specificational Approach to High Level Program Monitoring and Measuring

Authors:

Yingsha Liao,

Donald CohenAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 18, Issue 11

Pages 969 - 978

https://doi.org/10.1109/32.177366

Published: 01 November 1992 Publication History

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Abstract

Program monitoring and measuring is the activity of collecting information about the execution characteristics of a program. Although this activity is occasionally supported by special-purpose hardware, it is normally done by adding instrumentation code to the program so that it collects interesting data as it runs. Unfortunately, this alteration is itself a difficult task involving all the complexities of programming. Given some questions to be answered, the programmer must determine what data must be collected, determine where in the program those data can be collected, and add code to the program to collect that data and to process it to produce the desired results. The goal of the work described is to automate the process. A high-level program monitoring and measuring system is presented. The system provides a high-level specification language to let programmers specify what they want to know about their program's execution. It automatically generates an augmented program whose execution produces both the results of the original program and answers to the specified questions.

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Cited By

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Quinn AFlinn JCafarella M(2019)You can't debug what you can't seeProceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems10.1145/3317550.3321428(163-169)Online publication date: 13-May-2019
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Bauer LLigatti JWalker D(2009)Composing expressive runtime security policiesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/1525880.152588218:3(1-43)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2009
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Ligatti JBauer LWalker D(2009)Run-Time Enforcement of Nonsafety PoliciesACM Transactions on Information and System Security10.1145/1455526.145553212:3(1-41)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2009
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A Specificational Approach to High Level Program Monitoring and Measuring

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Reviews

Reviewer: Alfs T. Berztiss

The program monitoring and measuring system (PMMS) allows a performance engineer to indicate by means of a precise high-level specification what performance data are to be collected. Such performance data can greatly improve the effectiveness of program optimization and of preventive maintenance, but are rarely gathered because of the expense in terms of programmer time. The purpose of PMMS is to reduce this expense. A PMMS specification defines relations over program constructs, and a language similar to a database query language is used to extract the actual performance data. The precise knowledge of what data the performance engineer needs allows PMMS to restrict data gathering to just those data. The paper conveys the flavor of PMMS well, but some readers may wish for more detail. First, it is not quite clear how responsibilities are split between a performance engineer and PMMS. Second, footnote 5 suggests that in dealing with calls to functions, PMMS decides where to put the instrumentation code. This can complicate the estimation of the overhead due to function calls. Third, again referring to footnote 5, it is not clear that PMMS is language-independent. How would it cope with independent compilation, as in FORTRAN or Ada__?__ Can it deal with communication mechanisms that go beyond the classical call-return__?__ As a final note, reference number 2 in the text refers to both the second and third items in the reference section, so most text references are off by one.

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Published In

cover image IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Volume 18, Issue 11

Special issue on software measurement principles, techniques, and environments

November 1992

107 pages

ISSN:0098-5589

Editor:
Nancy G. Leveson
Univ. California, Irvine

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IEEE Press

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Published: 01 November 1992

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Bauer LLigatti JWalker D(2009)Composing expressive runtime security policiesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/1525880.152588218:3(1-43)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2009
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Ligatti JBauer LWalker D(2009)Run-Time Enforcement of Nonsafety PoliciesACM Transactions on Information and System Security10.1145/1455526.145553212:3(1-41)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1455526.1455532
Troya JRivera JVallecillo A(2009)On the specification of non-functional properties of systems by observationProceedings of the 2009 international conference on Models in Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-642-12261-3_28(296-309)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2009
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Bošković MHasselbring W(2009)Model Driven Performance Measurement and Assessment with MoDePeMARTProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_6(62-76)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
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Goldsmith SO'Callahan RAiken A(2005)Relational queries over program tracesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1103845.109484140:10(385-402)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2005
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Delgado NGates ARoach S(2004)A Taxonomy and Catalog of Runtime Software-Fault Monitoring ToolsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2004.9130:12(859-872)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2004
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SPARE: A Development Environment for Program Analysis Algorithms

A Formal Framework for ASTRAL Intralevel Proof Obligations

Specifying static analysis tools using formal methods

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