Tag: UndoDB

Undo Reverse Debugger “Pivots” to Record-Replay

I just found a story about Undo software that was rather interesting from a strategic perspective.  “Patient capital from CIC gives ‘time travelling’ company Undo space to pivot“, from the BusinessWeekly in the UK. The article describes a change from selling to individual developers, towards selling to enterprises. This is an important business change, but it also marks I think a technology thinking shift: from single-session debug to record-replay.

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UndoDB Recording during Automatic Testing

undo-logoUndoDB is an old player in the reverse debugging market, and have kept at it for ten years.  Last year, they released the Live Recorder record-replay function.  Most recently, they have showed an integration between the  recorder function and Jenkins, where the idea is that you record failing runs in your CI system and replay them on the developer’s machine.  Demo video is found on Youtube, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap8552P5vss.

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rr– The Mozilla Reverse Debugger

rrA new record, replay, and reverse debugger has appeared, and I just had to take a look at what they do and how they do it. “rr” has been developed by the Firefox developers at Mozilla Corporation, initially for the purpose of debugging Firefox itself. Starting at a debugger from the angle of attacking a particular program does let you get things going quickly, but the resulting tool is clearly generally useful, at least for Linux user-land programs on x86. Since I have tried to keep up with the developments in this field, a write-up seems to be called for.

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UndoDB Live Recorder: Record/Replay for Live Systems

I undo-logohave a long-standing interested in debugging in general and reverse debugging in particular and the related idea of record-replay debug (see a series of blog posts I did a few years ago on the topic: history 1, history 2, history 3, S4D report, updates, Simics reverse execution, and then Lab Cloud record/replay). Recently, I found out that Undo Software, one of the pioneers in the field, had released a product called “Live Recorder“. So I went to check it out by reading their materials and comparing it to what we have seen before.

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Reverse History Part Three – Products

In this final part of my series on the history of reverse debugging I will look at the products that launched around the mid-2000s and that finally made reverse debugging available in a commercially packaged product and not just research prototypes. Part one of this series provided a background on the technology and part two discussed various research papers on the topic going back to the early 1970s. The first commercial product featuring reverse debugging was launched in 2003, and then there have been a steady trickle of new products up until today.

Originally published in January 2012. Post updated 2012-09-28 with a revised timeline for Lauterbach CTS. Post updated 2016-04-05 to include Mozilla RR. Post updated 2016-12-26 to add Simulics. Post updated 2017-10-08 to add Microsoft WinDbg. Post updated 2018-07-28 to add Borland Turbo Debugger.

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