Title :
A Technique for Enabling and Supporting Debugging of Field Failures
Author :
Clause, James ; Orso, Alessandro
Author_Institution :
Coll. of Comput., Georgia Inst. of Technol., Atlanta, GA
Abstract :
It is difficult to fully assess the quality of software in- house, outside the actual time and context in which it will execute after deployment. As a result, it is common for software to manifest field failures, failures that occur on user machines due to untested behavior. Field failures are typically difficult to recreate and investigate on developer platforms, and existing techniques based on crash reporting provide only limited support for this task. In this paper, we present a technique for recording, reproducing, and minimizing failing executions that enables and supports in- house debugging of field failures. We also present a tool that implements our technique and an empirical study that evaluates the technique on a widely used e-mail client.
Keywords :
program debugging; software engineering; software quality; field failures debugging; software development; software quality; Application software; Computer crashes; Educational institutions; Pressing; Quality assurance; Software debugging; Software prototyping; Software quality; Software testing; Software tools;
Conference_Titel :
Software Engineering, 2007. ICSE 2007. 29th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Minneapolis, MN
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2828-7
DOI :
10.1109/ICSE.2007.10