SHF: Small: BugX: In-house Debugging of Field Failures to Improve Software Quality

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A recent survey conducted among developers of the Apache, Eclipse, andMozilla projects showed that the ability to recreate fieldfailures--failures of the software that occur after deployment, onuser machines--is considered of fundamental importance wheninvestigating bug reports. Unfortunately, the information typicallycontained in a bug report, such as memory dumps or call stacks, isusually insufficient for recreating the problem. Even more advancedapproaches for gathering field data and help in-house debugging tendto provide too little information to developers and to be thereforeineffective.The overall goal of this project is to improve the state of the art byallowing, supporting, and partially automating, actual in-housedebugging of field failures. Specifically, this research will developnovel techniques and tools that let developers reproduce, analyze, andunderstand, in-house, failures observed in the field. Given a fieldfailure, the developed techniques will (1) collect a suitable set ofdata about the failure on the user machine, (2) generate one or moreinputs that can be executed against the failing application and resultin a failure analogous to the one observed, and (3) provide hints onthe root causes of the failure and possible fixes for these causes. Toachieve this goal, the research will combine static and dynamicprogram analysis techniques and leverage and extend techniques fortesting deployed software, input generation and anonymization, andsoftware debugging. If successful, this research will provideunprecedented advantages to developers by allowing them to debug fieldfailures in the same way in which they debug in-house ones, which willimprove software quality and benefit all segments of society thatdepend on software. Furthermore, the project will develop and makeavailable to the broader scientific community educational materialsthat incorporate research findings, tools that implement thetechniques developed within the project, and samples of the softwarebenchmarks used in empirical evaluations. The availability ofcurriculum materials, tools, infrastructure, and benchmarks willadvance knowledge, enable additional research in the area, andultimately further benefit society.