Debugging

Serverless architecture is an emerging design style for cloud-based software systems. Testing serverless applications plays an important role in software quality assurance. However, currently, there is no consensus on how to test and debug such systems properly. Moreover, the current lack of mature tooling is a central challenge. We designed and conducted three interviews among two tools vendor leaders in the serverless domain (Epsagon and Thundra) and one expert in the field (Yan Cui), investigating the good and bad practices and several open issues. The current status of testing and debugging in serverless-based applications depicted by the experts helped us to highlight issues and challenges that need to be deeply investigated.

Approaches for automatic crash reproduction aim to generate test cases that reproduce crashes starting from the crash stack traces. These tests help developers during their debugging practices. One of the most promising techniques in this research field leverages search-based software testing techniques for generating crash reproducing test cases. In this paper, we introduce Botsing, an open-source search-based crash reproduction framework for Java. Botsing implements state-of-the-art and novel approaches for crash reproduction. The well-documented architecture of Botsing makes it an easy-to-extend framework, and can hence be used for implementing new approaches to improve crash reproduction. We have applied Botsing to a wide range of crashes collected from open source systems. Furthermore, we conducted a qualitative assessment of the crash-reproducing test cases with our industrial partners. In both cases, Botsing could reproduce a notable amount of the given stack traces.