A Technique for Enabling and Supporting Debugging of Field Failures

It is difficult to fully assess the quality of software inhouse, 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 inhouse 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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: James A. Clause, Alessandro Orso
• Keywords: Crash Reporting Provide, Field Failures, ICSE 2007, Inhouse Debugging, Software Engineering