Automating Crash Report Analysis Using 'Exception-based Patterns' & 'Reference Assembly mapping'

When a complex real-world application is deployed post-release, a number of crash reports are generated. As the number of clients using the product increases, so do the crash reports. Typically, the approach followed in many software organizations is to manually analyze a crash report to identify the erroneous module responsible for the crash. Naturally, when a large number of crash reports are generated daily, the development team requires a substantial amount of time to analyze all these reports. This in turn increases the turn-around time for crash report analysis which often leaves customers unhappy. In order to address this problem, we have developed an automated method to analyze a crash report and identify the erroneous module. This method is based on a novel algorithm that searches for exception-based patterns in crash reports and maps reference assemblies. We have applied this method to several thousand crash reports across four sub-systems of an industrial automation application. Results indicate that the algorithm not only achieves a high accuracy in finding the erroneous module and subsystem behind a crash, but also significantly reduces the turn-around time for crash report analysis.