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An empirical study of profiling strategies for released software and their impact on testing activities

An understanding of how software is employed in the field can yield many opportunities for quality improvements. Profiling released software can provide such an understanding. However, profiling released software is diffcult due to the potentially large number of deployed sites that must be profiled, the extreme transparency expectations, and the remote data collection and deployment management process. Researchers have recently proposed various approaches to tap into the opportunities and overcome those challenges. Initial studies have illustrated the application of these approaches and have shown their feasibility. Still, the promising proposed approaches, and the tradeoffs between overhead, accuracy, and potential benefits for the testing activity have been barely quantified. This paper aims to over-come those limitations. Our analysis of 1200 user sessions on a 155 KLOC system substantiates the ability of field data to support test suite improvements, quantifies different approaches previously introduced in isolation, and assesses the efficiency of profiling techniques for released software and the effectiveness of their associated testing efforts.