Mining Program Workflow from Interleaved Traces

Successful software maintenance is becoming increasingly critical due to the increasing dependence of our society and economy on software systems. One key problem of software maintenance is the difficulty in understanding the evolving software systems. Program workflows can help system operators and administrators to understand system behaviors and verify system executions so as to greatly facilitate system maintenance. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to automatically discover program workflows from event traces that record system events during system execution. Different from existing workflow mining algorithms, our approach can construct concurrent workflows from traces of interleaved events. Our workflow mining approach is a three-step coarse-to-fine algorithm. At first, we mine temporal dependencies for each pair of events. Then, based on the mined pair-wise temporal dependencies, we construct a basic workflow model by a breadth-first path pruning algorithm. After that, we refine the workflow by verifying it with all training event traces. The refinement algorithm tries to find out a workflow that can interpret all event traces with minimal state transitions and threads. The results of both simulation data and real program data show that our algorithm is highly effective.