Understanding the runtime behavioral aspects of a software system is fundamental for several software engineering tasks, such as testing and code comprehension. For this purpose, typically, one needs to instrument the system and collect data from its execution. Despite the importance of runtime analysis, few tools have been created and made public to support developers extracting information from software execution. In this paper, we propose SpotFlow, a tool to ease the runtime analysis of Python programs. With SpotFlow, practitioners and researchers can easily extract information about executed methods, run lines, argument values, return values, variable states, and thrown exceptions. Finally, we present tool prototypes built on top of SpotFlow to support software testing and code comprehension and we detail how SpotFlow runtime data can support novel empirical studies and datasets. SpotFlow is publicly available at https://github.com/andrehora/spotflow. Video: https://youtu.be/jhOv3nKz_u4.

Andre Hora is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UFMG, Brazil. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Lille, France. He was a Postdoctoral researcher at the ASERG group. He worked as a software engineer at Inria (Lille, France) and was research intern at Siemens (Erlangen, Germany).