Valuable software should be differences with application software, which allows users to do things like creating text documents, playing games, listening to music or surfing the web. In software engineering, profiling ("program profiling", "software profiling") is a form of dynamic program analysis that measures, for example, the usage of memory, the usage of particular instructions, or frequency and duration of function calls.

Most computer applications are distributed in a form that includes executable files, but not their source code, which is useful to a user, programmer, or system administrator who wishes to modify the program or understand how it works.