CSIclipse: Presenting Crash Analysis Data to DevelopersCSIclipse: Presenting Crash Analysis Data to DevelopersThis research was conducted by Peter Ohmann and Ben Liblit. The paper appeared in the 2015 Eclipse Technology eXchange Workshop (ETX 2015).
Debugging is difficult and costly, especially for failures that occur after deployment. In prior work, we developed a suite of instrumentation and analysis tools, collectively titled the Crash Scene Investigation toolkit (CSI). These tools aid developers by providing additional information about failing program executions using latent data in post-failure memory dumps. While we showed that our technique is effective in reducing execution ambiguity, it lacked a proper user interface for developers.
In this paper, we present CSIclipse, a work-in-progress plugin for the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) that brings our analyses directly to the user. The goal of our plugin is to ease the burden of debugging production failures by conveniently presenting CSI trace and analysis data with intuitive source code overlays and powerful data exploration mechanisms. While designed for our CSI data, our plugin is likely general enough to support trace data from a variety of program analyses.
The full paper is available as a single PDF document. A suggested BibTeX citation record is also available.