710444The Undo Flight Recorder: a new approach to fixing software failures in the fieldClosedGRD Proof of ConceptInnovate UKthis is a proposal for the development of a new technology to assist in the diagnosis and fixing of Linux software failures (i.e. bugs): the Undo Flight Recorder (UFR). Software is written by developers working for a Software Vendor, and consumed by an End User. End users may also work for the software vendor (e.g. in-house developers, testing departments), although more usually for another organisation. When software contains bugs, the end user will suffer crashes and/or a decrease in their applications’ performance. Buggy software creates significant costs to the vendor and represents even greater costs to the end user. It is the software vendor’s responsibility to fix bugs reported by end users. To analyse an end user reported software failure, developers must (1) reproduce in-house, or (2) gain remote access to the end user’s computer, or (3) travel to the end user’s site, or (4) use an error-reporting scheme to gather sufficient information. Error-reporting schemes are desirable as 1-3 are usually expensive and time-consuming and often impossible. However, existing error-reporting schemes tend to contain at best a snapshot of the program state at the time of the failure, with very limited information about what led up to the failure. UFR is an error-reporting scheme significantly better than anything currently in use. It removes the need to reproduce software failures. Once embedded into the software vendor’s program, UFR enables the program to record itself. The resulting recording contains everything the buggy program did and can be loaded into the developer’s computer for analysis. Furthermore, the Linux debugging tools market is under-developed when compared to tools available for other operating systems such as Windows.