Skip to main content

ReplayDirector - Something on my radar

On my Job as a J2EE consultant, I have encountered situations where I am unable to reproduce a problem QA encountered. For one, it may be a really hard-to-reproduce or not-realistically-probable situation in a normal user interaction and just that QA stumbled on it. Or it could be a piss port job by QA that they just broke it, no idea how - but the user might have higher probability of reaching that state. Either way, My job as a developer is to see that NO probabilistic known scenario should break my application. So here is one scenario I know the system is broken but I don't know how to fix it, because I just know the problem not its cause. Its a very challenging albeit annoying situation. I find myself very energetic in the beginning but as time passes without being able to find the cause, I get stressed.

I guess many of you in the business, have had this situation some or the other time. Here is where recording the whole state of jvm comes into picture. ReplaySolutions has an innovative product that does something like that. It records all the activity (Even in a JEE with multi-tier stack) and records them as isolated sessions. This is (their caption) Tivo for Java programs. These Isolated sessions are completely replay able, independent of the dependencies. By Idea, this should eliminate all those variables and give you exactly all the state which caused the bug to occur. I haven't seen this in action my self (I am yet to be invited on their beta program). But They have a demo posted on Eclipse live, if you are interested to catch it in action. There are some important features like being able to capture the screens, submit a session directly as a Bug etc. They claim this is a light weight Byte analysing agent that binds itself to the JVM. I just have to wait and see how this all gels in. May be some day, I dont have to go through all that stress of - "O come on man, How the heck did QA get this - let me just mark it unreproducible".

Leave comments in Guestbook

Popular posts from this blog

One page Stock

Alright.. That was a long absence. The whole last week I dint blog. I dint go away. I was "occupied". I was learning stock trading. Its very fascinating. I have a good weeeked blog for you all. Here is my experience. I can literally hyper-link every word from the following paragraphs, but I am writing it as simple as I can so you can look up the italicised words in wikipedia . I got a paper trading account from a brokerage firm . You need one brokerage account first. Then it can be an Equity account where all your money is yours or a Margin account , where some of the money is lent by the brokerage firm. Then I get Buying power , which is the dollor value of how much stocks you can buy. I can make profit by simple rules. Buy when Price is low. Sell when price is high. There is another more intersting way of earning money. Selling short . Thats when price is not high, per say, but when are confident that the price WILL go down. then buy back when its lowest. This is what

Appcache manifest file issues/caveats

Application cache (appcache) is a powerful feature in HTML5. However, it does come with baggage. Many (see links below) advocated ferociously against it due to tricky issues it comes with. For someone who is just testing waters, these issues may throw them off grid. Knowing them before hand helps reduce some unpredictable effects.

classpath*: making your Modular Spring Resources

Spring gives multiple options to load XML resources for building contexts. the reference documentation does explain this feature quite well. However, I am taking my shot at explaining the different practical scenarios ( by order of growing modularisation) For Example, A simplest Spring based web Context Loader can be configured with resources like this <context-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>applicationContext.xml</param-value> </context-param> <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class> </listener> You just need to put applicationContext.xml in WEB-INF/ folder of your webapp. However, Typically an application is n-tiered. You can also have multiple files setup and in relative paths. like <param-value> context-files/applicationContext.xml context-files/dao.xml context-files/service.xml </param-value>