High-level polymetric views of condensed run-time information

Understanding the run-time behavior of object-oriented legacy systems is a complex task due to factors such as late binding and polymorphism. Current approaches extract and use information from the complete execution trace of a system. The sheer size and complexity of such traces make their handling, storage, and analysis difficult. Current software systems which run almost nonstop do not permit such a full analysis. In this paper we present a lightweight approach based on the extraction of a condensed amount of information, e.g., measurements, that does not require a full trace. Using this condensed information, we propose a visualization approach which allows us to identify and understand certain aspects of the objects' lifetime such as their role played in the creation of other objects and the communication architecture they support.