Enhancing Root Cause Analysis with Runtime Models and Interactive Visualizations

Recent research shows that runtime models can be used to build dynamic systems coping with changing requirements and execution environments. As software systems are getting bigger and more complex, locating malfunctioning software parts is no trivial task because of the vast amount of possible error sources and produced logging information. This information has to be traced back to faulty components, which often leads to editing of code scattered over different software artefacts. With such a fragmented view, challenges arise in finding out the root cause of the unwanted software behaviour. In this paper we propose the usage of runtime models in combination with model-driven techniques and interactive visualizations to ease tracing between log file entries and corresponding software artefacts. The contribution of this paper is a repository-based approach to augment root cause analysis with interactive tracing views while maximizing reusability of models created during the software development process.