Interactive record/replay for web application debugging

Burg, Brian R.; Bailey, Richard; Ko, Amy J.; Ernst, M.

doi:10.1145/2501988.2502050

Cited by 110 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…As an example, running Artemis on the five web applications with known bugs mentioned in Section 5.5 with a time budget of one hour per web application detected none of the bugs. However, as suggested in Section 1, such tools may be useful for providing initial event sequences for R 4 . A number of tools exist for recording and deterministically replaying JavaScript executions, taking into account nondeterministic inputs and scheduling.…”

Section: Algorithm Domain Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stateless model checking of event-driven applications

Jensen

Møller

Raychev

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applicatio

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Modern event-driven applications, such as, web pages and mobile apps, rely on asynchrony to ensure smooth end-user experience. Unfortunately, even though these applications are executed by a single event-loop thread, they can still exhibit nondeterministic behaviors depending on the execution order of interfering asynchronous events. As in classic shared-memory concurrency, this nondeterminism makes it challenging to discover errors that manifest only in specific schedules of events.In this work we propose the first stateless model checker for event-driven applications, called R4. Our algorithm systematically explores the nondeterminism in the application and concisely exposes its overall effect, which is useful for bug discovery. The algorithm builds on a combination of three key insights: (i) a dynamic partial order reduction (DPOR) technique for reducing the search space, tailored to the domain of event-driven applications, (ii) conflict-reversal bounding based on a hypothesis that most errors occur with a small number of event reorderings, and (iii) approximate replay of event sequences, which is critical for separating harmless from harmful nondeterminism.We instantiate R4 for the domain of client-side web applications and use it to analyze event interference in a number of real-world programs. The experimental results indicate that the precision and overall exploration capabilities of our system significantly exceed that of existing techniques.

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Section: Algorithm Domain Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stateless model checking of event-driven applications

Jensen

Møller

Raychev

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applicatio

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“…Capture and Replay. Related to our work are 'capture and replay' techniques for web applications [5,6,16,17,21]. The goal in most of these techniques is to find a deterministic way of replaying the same set of user events for debugging purposes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding JavaScript event-based interactions

Alimadadi

Sequeira

Mesbah

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Web applications have become one of the fastest growing types of software systems today. Despite their popularity, understanding the behaviour of modern web applications is still a challenging endeavour for developers during development and maintenance tasks. The challenges mainly stem from the dynamic, event-driven, and asynchronous nature of the JavaScript language. We propose a generic technique for capturing low-level event-based interactions in a web application and mapping those to a higher-level behavioural model. This model is then transformed into an interactive visualization, representing episodes of triggered causal and temporal events, related JavaScript code executions, and their impact on the dynamic DOM state. Our approach, implemented in a tool called Clematis, allows developers to easily understand the complex dynamic behaviour of their application at three di↵erent semantic levels of granularity. The results of our industrial controlled experiment show that Clematis is capable of improving the task accuracy by 61%, while reducing the task completion time by 47%.

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“…There are systems that provide captured output windows for debugging [1,7]. Especially, Whyline [7] provides an interactive captured output window as CapStudio.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

CapStudio

Fukahori¹,

Sakamoto

Kato

et al. 2014

CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Programmers write and edit their source code in a text editor. However, when they design the look-and-feel of a game application such as an image of a game character and an arrangement of a button, it would be more intuitive to edit the application by directly interacting with these objects on a game window. Although modern game engines realize this facility, they use a highly structured framework and limit what the programmer can edit. In this paper, we present CapStudio, a development environment for a visual application with an interactive screencast. A screencast is a movie player-like output window with code editing functionality. The screencast works with a traditional text editor. Modifications of source code in the text editor and visual elements on the screencast will be immediately reflected on each other. We created an example application and confirmed the feasibility of our approach.

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Interactive record/replay for web application debugging

Cited by 110 publications

References 26 publications

Stateless model checking of event-driven applications

Stateless model checking of event-driven applications

Understanding JavaScript event-based interactions

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