Generating Trace Table for Java Programs

It is difficult for programming beginners to understand the behavior of object-oriented programs since an object-oriented program contains various dynamic behavior such as dynamic binding and polymorphism. Trace table is useful to facilitate understanding of object-oriented programs. Traditionally a trace table is used to facilitate understanding of a structured non-object-oriented program. We extend the notion of trace table to represent the dynamic behavior of object-oriented programs and propose a trace table generator for Java programs in this paper. The trace table is represented using an Excel file and is designed by extending the notion of the UML sequence diagram. Each worksheet of the trace table corresponds to an instance. Each column of the worksheet contains a value of the instance variables and local variables within the instance as well as message sending among the instances. Each row of the worksheet represents a sequence of steps at each method. The trace table generator is implemented using JavaParser and inserts code to the original collection of Java source codes. Various information to generate a trace table is extracted by executing the converted source code.