One of the standard problems on any platform is reproducing a crash. that a user has reported. The problem is that you don't gather the sort of data before the crash that would help reproduce it. Now there is a program that will provide you with the information you need.

A team of researchers, Kevin Moran, Mario Linares-Vasquez, Carlos Bernal-Cárdenas, Christopher Vendome under the supervision of Dr Denys Poshyvanyk at the College of William & Mary in Virgina have tackled a very practical problem.  How can you automatically gather the data needed to reproduce a crash?

The structure of CrashScope

CrashScope is an automated testing tool that not only exercises your app it also records the data needed to reproduce it:

This tool explores a given Android app using systematic input generation, according to several strategies informed by static and dynamic analyses, with the intrinsic goal of triggering crashes. When a crash is detected, CRASHSCOPE generates an augmented crash report containing screenshots, detailed crash reproduction steps, the captured exception stack trace, and a fully replayable script that automatically reproduces the crash on a target devices.

In testing it was discovered that CrashScope is as good as existing automatic testing tools in provoking a crash but it was better at reporting and reproducing the crash. The whole process is completely automated. You submit your apk to CrashScope and it generates suitable inputs which are recorded. When a crash occurs a human readable report tells the programmer what happened. Probably more important is the generation of a script that automatically runs through the steps that lead up to the crash. In principle all you have to do is run this script again and you can study the crash in detail.

You can see it in action in the following video: 

You can try CrashScope out using an online service. You have to sign up to it at the moment, but an open source version is planned for the near future.

More Information

CrashScope: A Practical Automated Android Testing Tool

Automatically Discovering, Reporting and Reproducing Android Application Crashes

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