strace is a rather powerfull tool if you want to find out what a certain executable is doing. Which files it is opening, reading and writing and also which other executables it is executing. I personally have not used the '--stack-trace' option yet.
Earlier this year, I have used it to analyze what happens during the initial steps of live-bootstrap [1] and produce a web page with all the information [2]. For this, I wrote a C program to parse and process the output of strace.