Replay Debugger For Multi Threaded Android Applications

abstract: Debugging is a hard task. Debugging multi-threaded applications with their inherit non-determinism is all the more difficult. Non-determinism of any kind adds to the difficulty of cyclic debugging. In Android applications which are written in Java, threads and concurrency constructs introduce non-determinism to the program execution. Even with the same input, consecutive runs may not be the same and reproducing the same bug is a challenging task. This makes it difficult to understand and analyze the execution behavior or to understand the source of a failing execution. This thesis introduces a replay mechanism for Android applications written in Java and is based on the Lamport Clock. This tool provides the user with a controlled debugging environment, where the program execution follows the identical partially ordered happened-before dependency among threads, as during the recorded execution. In this, certain significant events like thread creation, synchronization etc. are recorded during run-time. They can later be replayed off-line, as many times as needed to pinpoint and fix an error in the application. It is software based approach and has been implemented by modifying the Dalvik Virtual Machine in the Android platform. The method of replay described in this thesis is independent of the underlying operating system scheduler.Dissertation/ThesisM.S. Computer Science 201