QVM: an efficient runtime for detecting defects in deployed systems

Abstract

Coping with software defects that occur in the post-deployment stage is a challenging problem: bugs may occur only when the system uses a specific configuration and only under certain usage scenarios. Nevertheless, halting production systems until the bug is tracked and fixed is often impossible. Thus, developers have to try to reproduce the bug in laboratory conditions. Often the reproduction of the bug consists of the lion share of the debugging effort.