Thesis Artifacts for: Enabling Dynamic Analysis and Software Visualization in Continuous Integration Platforms

Thesis Artifacts for: Enabling Dynamic Analysis and Software Visualization in Continuous Integration Platforms

A detailed description can be found in the README.md. The corressponding thesis can be found here.

Abstract

Software development is moving more and more towards a continuous process, where fast and frequent deployments are a requirement. This is often realized with continuous integration. At the same time, the complexity of applications is rising. Extensive testing of applications by hand is expensive and not feasible, especially when using continuous deployment. Hence the need for automated software analysis arises. Static analysis is well-proven but being based on the source code alone it can only gain superficial knowledge. To get desired insights into application runtime behavior, dynamic analysis must be performed, but that is complex to implement in a fully automated build process, where no user is available to interact with the system. In this thesis we conceptualize and implement an approach that offers dynamic analysis for applications from continuous integration builds. Specifically, it allows developers to visualize each build of the software as a 3D model by utilizing the ExplorViz live trace visualization software.