Reproducing and debugging field failures in house

Abstract

As confirmed by a recent survey among developers of the Apache, Eclipse, and Mozilla projects, failures of the software that occur in the field, after deployment, are difficult to reproduce and investigate in house. To address this problem, we propose an approach for in-house reproducing and debugging failures observed in the field. This approach can synthesize several executions similar to an observed field execution to help reproduce the observed field behaviors, and use these executions, in conjunction with several debugging techniques, to identify causes of the field failure. Our initial results are promising and provide evidence that our approach is able to reproduce failures using limited field execution information and help debugging. © 2013 IEEE.