Replay debugger for human interactive multiple threaded android applications
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Description
Debugging is a boring, tedious, time consuming but inevitable step of software development and debugging multiple threaded applications with user interactions is even more complicated. Since concurrency and synchronism are normal features in Android mobile applications, the order of thread execution may vary in every run even with the same input. To make things worse, the target erroneous cases may happen just in a few specific runs. Besides, the randomness of user interactions makes the whole debugging procedure more unpredictable. Thus, debugging a multiple threaded application is a tough and challenging task. This thesis introduces a replay mechanism for debugging user interactive multiple threaded Android applications. The approach is based on the 'Lamport Clock' concept, 'Event Driven' implementation and 'Client-Server' architecture. The debugger tool described in this thesis provides a user controlled debugging environment where users or developers are allowed to use modified record application to generate a log file. During the record time, all the necessary events like thread creation, synchronization and user input are recorded. Therefore, based on the information contained in the generated log files, the debugger tool can replay the application off-line since log files provide the deterministic order of execution. In this case, user or developers can replay an application as many times as they need to pinpoint the errors in the applications.