ReCrash: Making Software Failures Reproducible by Preserving Object States

It is very hard to fix a software failure without being able to reproduce it. However, reproducing a failure is often difficult and time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel technique, ReCrash, that generates multiple unit tests that reproduce a given program failure. During every execution of the target program, ReCrash stores partial copies of method arguments in memory. If the program fails (e.g., crashes), ReCrash uses the saved information to create unit tests reproducing the failure. We present ReCrashJ, an implementation of ReCrash for Java. ReCrashJ reproduced real crashes from Javac, SVNKit, Eclipsec, and BST. ReCrashJ is efficient, incurring 13%

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Shay Artzi, Sunghun Kim, Michael D. Ernst
• Keywords: ECOOP 2008, Program Failure, Programming Languages, Software Failure, Unit Tests