The Concept of Dynamic Analysis

Dynamic analysis is the analysis of the properties of a running program. In this paper, we explore two new dynamic analyses based on program profiling: — Frequency Spectrum Analysis. We show how analyzing the frequencies of program entities in a single execution can help programmers to decompose a program, identify related computations, and find computations related to specific input and output characteristics of a program.— Coverage Concept Analysis. Concept analysis of test coverage data computes dynamic analogs to static control flow relationships such as domination, postdomination, and regions. Comparison of these dynamically computed relationships to their static counterparts can point to areas of code requiring more testing and can aid programmers in understanding how a program and its test sets relate to one another.