1. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Debugging Field Failures by
Minimizing Captured Executions
James Clause and Alessandro Orso
Georgia Institute of Technology
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2. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
What are field failures?
Failures that occur after
application deployment
Difficult to reproduce
in-house ➞ difficult to
debug
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3. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Current approaches
Collect limited
information
Ask the user
how to reproduce
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4. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Replay / Debug
Develop Record
✘
Captured
failure
Inthefield
InhouseOur approach
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5. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Our approach
Inthefield
Inhouse
Replay / Debug
Develop Record
✘
Minimize
✘
Captured
failure
✘
Minimized
failure
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6. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Recording
Capture high-level
events
efficient
amenable to
minimization
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7. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Replaying
Interfere as little as
possible
redirect high-level
events
maintain relative time
of events
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8. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Minimization
Focus debugging effort
Iteratively remove what
is not necessary for
reproducing the failure
✘
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9. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
2-phase minimization
Time minimization
✂
Data minimization
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10. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Time minimization
Remove idle times
Reduce event latency
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11. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Data minimization
Remove data
hierarchically
1. complete files
2. pieces of files
3. individual characters✂
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12. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Prototype implementation
Record / Replay
x86/libc binaries
Minimization
customizable scripts
Limitations
non-determinism
GUI inputs
ADDAAssisting the Debugging of
Deployed Applications
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13. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Evaluation
RQ1: How effective is
ADDA at minimizing
failing executions?
RQ2: How much
overhead does ADDA
impose?
ADDA
Assisting the Debugging of
Deployed Applications
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14. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Subject and faults
Two real field failures
from Pine’s history
address book fault
header-color fault
Pine email and news client
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15. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
RQ1: Minimization results
✘
Around 10% of the
recording remains
after minimization
We were able to
debug the failures
using the minimized
recording
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16. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
RQ2: Overhead results
Online: negligible
overhead while
recording
Offline: less than 75
minutes to minimize
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17. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Future work
Support
GUI events
Non-determinism
Additional studies with
more subjects
ADDAAssisting the Debugging of
Deployed Applications
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18. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Utilize passing executions
Captured failures are
utilized for debugging
Captured successful
executions are
discarded
Can we also use
them?
Record
✘
Minimize
✘
Captured
failure
✔
Captured
success
Trash
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19. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Address privacy issues
Captured executions
can contain sensitive
information
How can we sanitize
sensitive information
but make sure the
failure still occurs?
✘
Captured
failure
Credit card numbers
Email addresses
Account names
Passwords
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20. ICSE ‘09: New Ideas and Emerging Results
Thank you
clause@cc.gatech.edu
www.cc.gatech.edu/~clause
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