Because of software's increasing dynamism and the heterogeneity of execution environments, the results of in-house testing and maintenance are often not representative of the way the software behaves in the field. To alleviate this problem, we present a technique for capturing and replaying partial executions of deployed software. Our technique can be used for various applications, including generation of test cases from user executions and post-mortem dynamic analysis. We present our technique and tool, some possible applications, and a preliminary empirical evaluation that provides initial evidence of the feasibility of our approach.

When a component in a large system fails, developers encounter two problems: (1) reproducing the failure, and (2) investigating the causes of such a failure. Our JINSI tool lets developers capture and replay the interactions between a component and its environment, thus allowing for reproducing the failure at will. In addition, JINSI uses delta debugging to automatically isolate the subset of the interactions that is relevant for the failure. In a first study, JINSI has successfully isolated the relevant interaction of a JAVA component: "Out of the 32 interactions with the VendingMachine component, seven interactions suffice to produce the failure."

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