Reproducing Field Failures for Programs with Complex Grammar-Based Input

To isolate and fix failures that occur in the field, after deployment, developers must be able to reproduce and investigate such failures in-house. In practice, however, bug reports rarely provide enough information to recreate field failures, thus making in-house debugging an arduous task. This task becomes even more challenging for programs whose input must adhere to a formal specification, such as a grammar. To help developers address this issue, we propose an approach for automatically generating inputs that recreate field failures in-house. Given a faulty program and a field failure for this program, our approach exploits the potential of grammar-guided genetic programming to iteratively find legal inputs that can trigger the observed failure using a limited amount of runtime data collected in the field. When applied to 11 failures of 5 real-world programs, our approach was able to reproduce all but one of the failures while imposing a limited amount of overhead.