Assessing the commercial viability of the Undo Flight Recorder: a new technology that assists in the diagnosis and fixing of Linux and Android software failures in the field.

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According to Cambridge University research, developers spend 50% of their developmenttime debugging, representing significant cost to the industry and to the economy as a whole.Undo Software, leading supplier of software quality tools for Linux and Android, is currentlydeveloping a new technology to assist in the diagnosis and fixing of Linux software failures:the Undo Flight Recorder (UFR). Software is written by developers working for a softwarevendor, and consumed by an end user. Buggy software creates significant costs to thesoftware vendor and represents even greater costs to the end user. To analyse an end userreported software failure, developers must either reproduce the error on their computer or, ifthat fails, travel to the end user site to reproduce the issue there. Both options are timeconsuming and expensive, and there is always the risk that the issue cannot be reproduced.The UFR is an error-reporting system that resolves this issue by removing the need toreproduce bugs. Once embedded into the software vendor’s program, UFR enables theprogram to record itself. The resulting recording contains an instruction-level recording of thedefective code’s execution, i.e. everything the buggy program did. Developers can then loadthe UFR recording onto their own machine to find and fix the bug; saving time and money,and preserving company reputation.Undo believes the UFR has huge market potential as any vertical which writes C/C++ onLinux and Android could use the UFR. These include: embedded, automotive,telecommunications, web and enterprise, amongst others. However, Undo only has visibilityinto one market: Electronic Design Automation (EDA), as its current product is being soldinto this vertical. The PoM grant will be used to understand the product and marketrequirements of different markets, to rank the markets in order of attractiveness and tounderstand the compelling ‘value proposition’ the UFR brings to each vertical.