For a software vendors innovation is key, but brings its challenges - including new software defects, that were not there before which naturally occur in a complex software development project
The company was committed to delivering high-quality software at speed; but their engineering teams were experiencing sporadic test failures, that were challenging to diagnose and were slowing them down. The engineers had created a randomised workload test system to try to reproduce issues seen by some of their customers in the field. The test system was successful in this; but because they have a large codebase, a complex control flow, and intermittent failures which were difficult to reproduce, they were still unable to address some of the failure modes at the pace they needed to.
Attempts to resolve these issues were consuming large quantities of the best software engineers’ time, and therefore costing the business money.
The solution was a software to accelerate defect resolution across all phases of the software development lifecycle with absolute certainty.
Secondly, the innovative software flight recording technology is the only way engineers can get full visibility into what their software did and why. By recording failed processes in test, the product, LiveRecorder, can capture software bugs ‘in the act’ - providing engineers with a 100% reproducible test case. There is no other supported technology like this available on the market.
“With Live Recorder, we were able to dramatically cut down the analysis time that is required to understand the root cause of very complex software defects.”
Chief Development Architect, data management system vendor
The company partnered with the client in a Centre of Excellence services engagement targeted at maximising the value of the technology across the engineering team at large. On-site advanced training was provided, user feedback was collated, improvements to the product integration were made; and forces were joined to co-produce a series of how-to videos to be shared internally to encourage internal usage.
The engineering team also tried reproducing failures on live systems. That approach was time-consuming and unproductive.
Additional challenges at the customerThe client was committed to delivering a reliable data management system their customers can trust; and they were keen to deliver their latest innovation to customers faster.But that is tough to do if the sophisticated testing systems in place result in a growing backlog of failing tests. Those had to be addressed and so it posed the risk of delaying delivery schedules - costing the business money. High-priority defects can easily cost up to $50K per defect if they are not resolved fast.
Technical facts
The software flight recording technology works on any applications built in C/C++, Go, or Rust, on Linux.
In 2020, it will also support Java applications built on Linux.
Integrations & APIs
Live Recorder integrates either via the command line, or by linking with a library and using a simple C API. This gives the customers the flexibility they need to integrate into any test system.