Research on automatic instrumentation for bytecode testing and debugging

Because of inherent drawbacks of Software Engineering, no software is defect-free. If the defects are resulted from highly optimized compilers, or in software without source code, software maintainers may have to test and debug programs at binary level, considering the fact that there are not practical reverse engineering tools. We propose a dynamic and automatic instrumentation framework, DABITTD, to support bytecode programs testing and debugging. According to the user requirements, it can provide the program run-time information and alter program run-time behaviors as well. DABITTD works at bytecode level without needs to access source code and doesn´t pollute the original class files. What is more, the whole process of instrumentation is performed fully automatically and dynamically. Meanwhile, in order to help maintainers fix defects, DABITTD can also directly edit class files on the disk statically.