Application Monitoring for bug reproduction in web-based applications

Abstract

Web applications are often built as Single Page Applications (SPA), for example applications offered by Google, Facebook, Twitter or Netflix. Users interact with SPAs through a single HTML page that is dynamically rewritten with new data from the web server (instead of a web browser that loads entire new HTML pages). Just like with any type of software system, debugging is a common activity during the development and maintenance of SPAs. In order to fix bugs observed during runtime, developers often try to reproduce the bug first to better understand it. However, research has shown that reproducing bugs is not always possible. In this paper we (i) develop a technique for Application Monitoring (AM) to collect data to support bug reproduction; and (ii) apply the monitoring technique in a SPA test bed as well as a real-world SPA application to show its feasibility. As part of our research we developed an initial version of the AM technique and implemented it in a prototype. Our evaluation using this prototype showed that it not only improves the efficiency of the bug reproduction process but also reduces information gaps caused by incomplete bug reports submitted by users. Additionally, compared to the information provided by users, data provided by AM is more accurate and detailed and covers a wider range of data. Future work includes deploying the AM framework in more SPAs and investigating how AM can be integrated into software developer workflows.