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ReCrash: Making Software Failures Reproducible by Preserving Object States

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ECOOP 2008 – Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5142))

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Abstract

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%–64% performance overhead. If this overhead is unacceptable, then ReCrashJ has another mode that has negligible overhead until a crash occurs and 0%–1.7% overhead until the crash occurs for a second time, at which point the test cases are generated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,  , Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Shay Artzi, Sunghun Kim & Michael D. Ernst

Authors
  1. Shay Artzi
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  2. Sunghun Kim
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  3. Michael D. Ernst
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Jan Vitek

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Artzi, S., Kim, S., Ernst, M.D. (2008). ReCrash: Making Software Failures Reproducible by Preserving Object States. In: Vitek, J. (eds) ECOOP 2008 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5142. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70592-5_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70592-5_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-70591-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70592-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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