Postmortem Debugging in Dynamic Environments

Despite the best efforts of software engineers to produce high-quality software, inevitably some bugs escape even the most rigorous testing process and are first encountered by end users. When this happens, such failures must be understood quickly, the underlying bugs fixed, and deployments patched to avoid another user (or the same one) running into the same problem again. As far back as 1951, the dawn of modern computing, Stanley Gill6 wrote that "some attention has, therefore, been given to the problem of dealing with mistakes after the program has been tried and found to fail." Gill went on to describe the first use of "the post-mortem technique" in software, whereby the running program was modified to record important system state as it ran so that the programmer could later understand what happened and why the software failed. © 2011 ACM.