Capture and Replay Technique for Reproducing Crash in Android Applications

Ajay K. Jha and Woo J. Lee

Keywords

Reproducing crash, field failure, capture, replay, debugging, android applications

Abstract

Software testing takes significant amount of time and cost. Many in-house software testing techniques are available but all the techniques can’t be used due to time and budget constraints so limited testing efforts are applied most of the time. Due to this limited testing effort there is always chance of failing the software in the field. To make this worse, developers don’t have any clue why deployed software failed or crashed. When the software crashes, stack trace is usually sent back to developer which in most of the cases does not provide enough information to pinpoint the cause of crash. We present a capture and replay technique which addresses this problem by recording the sequence of events in the field before crash and reproducing the sequence of events in-house after crash. Our approach is content-based which records events and data associated with those events during program execution. Our technique mainly focuses on the Android applications but similar approach can also be used for other object oriented applications.

Important Links:



Go Back