Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2012
Abstract
Instrumentation techniques are widely used for implementing dynamic program analysis tools like profilers or debuggers. While there are many toolkits and frameworks to support the development of such low-level instrumentations, there is little support for the refinement or composition of instrumentations.
A common practice is thus to copy and paste from existing instrumentation code. This, of course, violates well-established software engineering principles, results in code duplication, and hinders maintenance.
In this position paper we identify two challenges regarding the refinement and composition of instrumentations and illustrate them with a running example.