Reproducing software failures by exploiting the action history of undo features

Abstract

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.