Record and Replay GUI-based Applications with Less Overhead

Abstract — Debugging is, typically, a hard and time-consuming task. Fault-replication mechanisms facilitate the debugging pro-cess by providing software developers with an error’s “steps-to-reproduce”. The main challenge of fault-replication is the overhead imposed by recording all non-deterministic events of an execution, such as thread interleaving and the user interaction with the application. The overhead imposed by user input is especially significant for graphical-based applications. This paper proposes a new approach to record and replay user interactions with the GUI, which significantly reduces the amount of recorded information. We developed an open-source implementation of an execution-recording framework and evaluated it using a test bed that includes real bugs from well-known applications. We achieved average reductions of 3567 times fewer events recorded