SCARPE: A Technique and Tool for Selective Capture and Replay of Program Executions

Abstract

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.

Chronicler: Lightweight recording to reproduce field failures

“…A typical approach to remote debugging captures the state of the system just before a bug is encountered [13], [41]. However, unless such a system knows in advance that a bug is about to be encountered, it is impossible to provide developers with the exact state of the system before the bug is encountered, unless that state is constantly logged in anticipation of a defect.…”

“…to use only a stack trace, rather than a complete state history) [39] or the breadth of information recorded (e.g. to only record information on a particular subsystem that a developer identifies as potentially buggy) [41]. While these approaches can reduce overhead significantly, to a best case of 1% (with worst cases over 800%), they do not guarantee reproducibility.…”

“…Scarpe [41] is a bug reproduction tool that requires developers to annotate their application to show component boundaries, and captures interactions between the classes of interest and external code. This approach can be quite efficient when the component selected for logging has limited external interaction, but in other cases the overhead is as high as 877%.…”

Repeatedly-executed-method viewer for efficient visualization of execution paths and states in Java

“…Replaying a single method is a selective capture and replay technique proposed by Joshi and Orso [6]. Our tool offers a new user interface for analyzing the behavior of a method.…”

“…Omniscient debugging and logging-based techniques [6,7,8] are promising approaches to understanding the dynamic behavior of a program for software maintenance. Omniscient debugging [8] enables developers to inspect the state Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”