Improved Bug Reporting and Reproduction through Non-intrusive GUI Usage Monitoring and Automated Replaying

Herbold, Steffen; Grabowski, Jens; Waack, Stephan; Bünting, Uwe

doi:10.1109/icstw.2011.66

Cited by 20 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Equipping bug tracking systems with better collaboration tools would facilitate and enhance the communication needs between the two parties. For the category "Environmental Di↵erences" (24%), techniques that make it easier to capture the steps leading to the bug through, e.g., record/replay methods [22], monitoring the dynamic execution of applications [14], or capturing user interactions [27] would be helpful to reproduce the bug report.…”

Section: Communication Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Works for me! characterizing non-reproducible bug reports

Joorabchi

Mirzaaghaei

Mesbah

2014

Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

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Bug repository systems have become an integral component of software development activities. Ideally, each bug report should help developers to find and fix a software fault. However, there is a subset of reported bugs that is not (easily) reproducible, on which developers spend considerable amounts of time and e↵ort. We present an empirical analysis of nonreproducible bug reports to characterize their rate, nature, and root causes. We mine one industrial and five opensource bug repositories, resulting in 32K non-reproducible bug reports. We (1) compare properties of non-reproducible reports with their counterparts such as active time and number of authors, (2) investigate their life-cycle patterns, and (3) examine 120 Fixed non-reproducible reports. In addition, we qualitatively classify a set of randomly selected non-reproducible bug reports (1,643) into six common categories. Our results show that, on average, non-reproducible bug reports pertain to 17% of all bug reports, remain active three months longer than their counterparts, can be mainly (45%) classified as "Interbug Dependencies", and 66% of Fixed non-reproducible reports were indeed reproduced and fixed.

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Section: Communication Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Works for me! characterizing non-reproducible bug reports

Joorabchi

Mirzaaghaei

Mesbah

2014

Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

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“…Pham et al [11] capture screen casts in order to document automated GUI tests. Herbold et al [6] as well as Steven et al [13] capture the application events triggered by user actions and enable to replay them. In contrast, we propose to use another source of user actions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reproducing software failures by exploiting the action history of undo features

Roehm¹,

Bruegge²

2014

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Bug reports seldom contain information about the steps to reproduce a failure. Therefore, failure reproduction is a time consuming, difficult, and sometimes impossible task for software developers. Users are either unaware of the importance of steps to reproduce, are unable to describe them, or do not have time to report them. Similarly, automated crash reporting tools usually do not capture this information.In order to tackle this problem, we propose to exploit the action history of undo features, i.e. the history of user actions captured by many applications in order to allow users to undo previous actions. As it is captured anyway, our approach does not introduce additional monitoring overhead. We propose to extract the action history upon occurrence of a failure and present it to developers during bug fixing. Our hypothesis is that information about user actions contained in the action history of undo features enables developers to reproduce failures. We support this hypothesis with anecdotal evidence from a small empirical study of bug reports. A thorough evaluation is necessary to investigate the applicability and impact of our approach and to compare it to existing capture/ replay approaches.

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“…Herbold at al. [12] developed a non-intrusive, easily to integrate GUI-based monitoring mechanism which would automatically collect usage logs of different user activities and allow replaying them for the purpose of reproducing bugs whenever they occur. It is also important to note that in some cases it might be embarrassing for companies when such privacy-centric data is reviled.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When a bug is encountered, the bug reporter provides relevant information about the bug in a bug tracking system and describes how it can 2 be recreated. Often detailed description of problems, software versions, screenshots, step-wise guidance or navigation is provided by attaching images, videos and textual information [4,5,12]. Using this information, developers locally recreate the scenario in which the bug was detected.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bug Reproduction: A Collaborative Practice Within Software Maintenance Activities

Vyas

Fritz

Shepherd

2014

COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 27-30 May 2014, Nice (France

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Software development settings provide a great opportunity for CSCW researchers to study collaborative work. In this paper, we explore a specific work practice called bug reproduction that is a part of the software bug-fixing process. Bug reproduction is a highly collaborative process by which software developers attempt to locally replicate the 'environment' within which a bug was originally encountered. Customers, who encounter bugs in their everyday use of systems, play an important role in bug reproduction as they provide useful information to developers, in the form of steps for reproduction, software screenshots, trace logs, and other ways to describe a problem. Bug reproduction, however, poses major hurdles in software maintenance as it is often challenging to replicate the contextual aspects that are at play at the customers' end. To study the bug reproduction process from a human-centered perspective, we carried out an ethnographic study at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and half-a-day observation of sixteen software developers working on different software maintenance projects, we studied bug reproduction. In this paper, we present a holistic view of bug reproduction practices from a real-world setting and discuss implications for designing tools to address the challenges developers face during bug reproduction. Abstract. Software development settings provide a great opportunity for CSCW researchers to study collaborative work. In this paper, we explore a specific work practice called bug reproduction that is a part of the software bug-fixing process. Bug reproduction is a highly collaborative process by which software developers attempt to locally replicate the 'environment' within which a bug was originally encountered. Customers, who encounter bugs in their everyday use of systems, play an important role in bug reproduction as they provide useful information to developers, in the form of steps for reproduction, software screenshots, trace logs, and other ways to describe a problem. Bug reproduction, however, poses major hurdles in software maintenance as it is often challenging to replicate the contextual aspects that are at play at the customers' end. To study the bug reproduction process from a human-centered perspective, we carried out an ethnographic study at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and half-a-day observation of sixteen software developers working on different software maintenance projects, we studied bug reproduction. In this paper, we present a holistic view of bug reproduction practices from a real-world setting and discuss implications for designing tools to address the challenges developers face during bug reproduction.

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Improved Bug Reporting and Reproduction through Non-intrusive GUI Usage Monitoring and Automated Replaying

Cited by 20 publications

References 13 publications

Works for me! characterizing non-reproducible bug reports

Works for me! characterizing non-reproducible bug reports

Reproducing software failures by exploiting the action history of undo features

Bug Reproduction: A Collaborative Practice Within Software Maintenance Activities

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