STAR: Stack Trace based Automatic Crash Reproduction

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "STAR: Stack Trace based Automatic Crash Reproduction"

by

Mr. Ning CHEN


ABSTRACT:

Software crash reproduction is a necessary first step for debugging. 
Unfortunat ely, it is often labor intensive. 
To automate crash reproduction, many capture-replay approaches have been 
propos ed. These approaches 
capture software executions and reliably reproduce the captured 
executions. How ever, these approaches usually 
incur substantial performance overhead. Alternatively, 
post-failure-process app roaches such as Windows Error 
Reporting System and Google Breakpad collect memory dumps or stack traces 
after  crashes occurred. Since 
these approaches do not incur any additional performance overhead, they 
are wid ely used in practice. The 
information collected from post-failure-process approaches is used to 
prioritiz e debugging effort and provide 
debugging hints for developers. Eventually, developers need to manually 
reprodu ce crashes using the information, 
which requires non-trivial effort. In this proposal, I propose an 
automatic cra sh reproduction framework, STAR, which 
can reproduce crashes using only the crash stack trace information. The 
framewo rk can generate crash reproducible 
test cases without incurring performance overhead to real world 
executions.


Date:                   Tuesday, 23 April 2013

Time:                   4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3405
                         lifts 17/18

Committee Members:      Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Raymond Wong (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
 			Dr. Charles Zhang


**** ALL are Welcome ****