International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / XRunner, a UNIX, client-server based, automated record-replay test tool developed by Mercury Interactive Corporation, was used by a project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to automate intensive GUI/window-driven satellite operations functions. This work was part of the Integrated Monitoring, Analysis and Control COTS System (IMACCS), a COTS integration prototype development effort. XRunner, running in its object-oriented context sensitive mode, recorded the window/push-button images of significant events in spacecraft operations with sequential steps and generated test script language (TSL) for subsequent replay or test verification. The recorded TSL was optimized such that scenario replay timing, sequencing, grouping, and UNIX interactions became simple, easily-automated tasks instead of manually intensive, error-prone operations. This feature of the XRunner tool is expected to greatly enhance operations and testing.

Rich Communication Services(RCS) program is a GSM Association (GSMA) initiative to create inter-operator communication services based on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) . This initiative came up as the Global Telecom Operators ́response to the decline in their revenues and to help compete ’Over The Top’(OTT) service providers such as Viber, whatsapp, etc. RCS is an universal standard, making it inter-operable between mul- tiple service providers unlike OTT services with closed communities. RCS services use IMS as the underlying architecture with a RCS stack imple- mented into Android background service which offers high level API. For the purpose of testing RCS stack functionality which is usually affected by external dependencies like third party vendors, or ISP customizations in real telecommunication scenario, there is a persistent demand for scenario replay tools that can recreate the range of test conditions similar to those experienced in live deployments. There is also a need to evaluate the per- formance of service provided by application servers in the network in-order to predict the factors affecting the RCS service in general. In this work, we propose a tool to address the RCS scenario repro- duction in a test environment. The tool is implemented within an automated test environment with full control on interaction with the RCS stack, hence the ability to replay the scenario in a controlled fashion. To achieve the goal, the tool replays trace interactively with the RCS stack in a stateful manner , it ensures no improper packet generation which is critical feature for test environments where protocol semantics accuracy is fundamental. A detailed demonstration of how the tool can be deployed in test environ- ments is stated. A novel approach is used to validate the effectiveness of the replayed scenario, the sequence of events and states are compared to those from the recorded scenario using a call-back service to indicate the state. The replayed scenario showed strong relationship with the recorded RCS scenario. The paper also presents a performance evaluation of Application service by considering the request-reponse times of Network Registration procedure. The obtained results show that the average time taken for the Registration process is 555 milliseconds and in few instances there exists larger deviations from this average value showing the faulty behavior of the Server which is most crucial during the debugging process for the developers.

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MPI I/O replay (MPIOR) is an I/O performance modeling and prediction tool used to trace and replay a parallel application to determine application performance under a new I/O sub system. The trace collector deduces synchronization inter-dependencies between nodes and I/O demands placed by each node on the storage subsystem. It uses a novel runtime graph traversal technique to filter and log only those MPI calls that affect I/O, thus substantially reducing both the number of runs and the size of the trace file. Unlike other such tools, MPIOR collects a valid trace in a single run and it does not rely on node sampling or I/O sampling. MPIOR's post processing engine analyzes the trace files and sets up the re-player. Due to minimal overhead for trace collection, MPIOR can be used during production runs rather than just as a debugging tool. The re-player mimics the behavior of the application across a variety of storage systems by mapping multiple processes to multiple threads running on a single node. We show average replay error for parallel applications is below 30%. / Master of Science

No description available.

abstract: Debugging is a hard task. Debugging multi-threaded applications with their inherit non-determinism is all the more difficult. Non-determinism of any kind adds to the difficulty of cyclic debugging. In Android applications which are written in Java, threads and concurrency constructs introduce non-determinism to the program execution. Even with the same input, consecutive runs may not be the same and reproducing the same bug is a challenging task. This makes it difficult to understand and analyze the execution behavior or to understand the source of a failing execution. This thesis introduces a replay mechanism for Android applications written in Java and is based on the Lamport Clock. This tool provides the user with a controlled debugging environment, where the program execution follows the identical partially ordered happened-before dependency among threads, as during the recorded execution. In this, certain significant events like thread creation, synchronization etc. are recorded during run-time. They can later be replayed off-line, as many times as needed to pinpoint and fix an error in the application. It is software based approach and has been implemented by modifying the Dalvik Virtual Machine in the Android platform. The method of replay described in this thesis is independent of the underlying operating system scheduler. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

Educational games have become an established paradigm of instructional practice; however, there is still much to be learned about how to design games to be the most beneficial for learners. An important consideration when designing an educational game is whether there is good alignment between its content goals and the instructional behaviors it makes in order to reinforce those goals. Existing methods for measuring alignment are labor intensive and use complex auditing procedures, making it difficult to define and evaluate this alignment in order to guide the educational game design process. This thesis explores a way to operationalize this concept of alignment and demonstrates an analysis technique that can help educational game designers to both measure the alignment of current educational game designs and predict the alignment of prototypes of future iterations. In my work, I explore the use of Replay Analysis, a novel technique that uses in-game replays of player sessions as a data source to support analysis. This method can be used to capture gameplay experience for the evaluation of alignment, as well as other forms of analysis. The majority of this work has been performed in the context of RumbleBlocks, an educational game that teaches basic structural stability and balance concepts to young children. Using Replay Analysis, I leveraged replay data during a formative evaluation of RumbleBlocks to highlight some misalignments the game likely possesses in how it teaches some concepts of stability to players. These results led to suggestions for several design iterations. Through exploring these design iterations, I further demonstrate an extension of Replay Analysis called Projective Replay Analysis, which uses recorded student replay data in prototypes of new versions of a game to predict whether the new version would be an improvement. I implemented two forms of Projective Replay: Literal Projective Replay, which uses a naïve player model that replays past player actions through a new game version exactly as they were originally recorded; and Flexible Projective Replay, which augments the process with an AI player model that uses prior player actions as training data to learn to play through a new game. To assess the validity of this method of game evaluation, I performed a new replication study of the original formative evaluation to validate whether the conclusions reached through virtual methods would agree with those reached in a normal playtesting paradigm. Ultimately, my findings were that Literal Projective Replay was able to predict a new and unanticipated misalignment with the game, but Flexible Projective Replay, as currently implemented, has limitations in its ability to explore new game spaces. This work makes contributions to the fields of human-computer interaction by exploring the benefits and limitations of different replay paradigms for the evaluation of interactive systems; learning sciences by establishing a novel operationalization of alignment for instructional moves; and educational game design by providing a model for using Projective Replay Analysis to guide the iterative development of an educational game.

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abstract: Debugging is a boring, tedious, time consuming but inevitable step of software development and debugging multiple threaded applications with user interactions is even more complicated. Since concurrency and synchronism are normal features in Android mobile applications, the order of thread execution may vary in every run even with the same input. To make things worse, the target erroneous cases may happen just in a few specific runs. Besides, the randomness of user interactions makes the whole debugging procedure more unpredictable. Thus, debugging a multiple threaded application is a tough and challenging task. This thesis introduces a replay mechanism for debugging user interactive multiple threaded Android applications. The approach is based on the 'Lamport Clock' concept, 'Event Driven' implementation and 'Client-Server' architecture. The debugger tool described in this thesis provides a user controlled debugging environment where users or developers are allowed to use modified record application to generate a log file. During the record time, all the necessary events like thread creation, synchronization and user input are recorded. Therefore, based on the information contained in the generated log files, the debugger tool can replay the application off-line since log files provide the deterministic order of execution. In this case, user or developers can replay an application as many times as they need to pinpoint the errors in the applications. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2012

BACKGROUND:Aging is typically accompanied by memory decline and changes in hippocampal function. Among these changes is a decline in the activity of the dentate gyrus (DG) during behavior. Lasting memory, however, is thought to also require recapitulation of recent memory traces during subsequent rest - a phenomenon, termed memory trace reactivation, which is compromised in hippocampal CA1 with progressive age. This process has yet to be assessed in the aged DG, despite its prominent role in age-related memory impairment. Using zif268 transcription to measure granule cell recruitment, DG activity in adult and aged animals was assessed both during spatial exploration and as animals remained at rest in the home cage in order to detect potential memory-related replay.RESULTS:Consistent with the observation of memory trace reactivation in DG, the probability that an individual granule cell transcribes zif268 during rest in the animal's home cage is increased by recent experience in a novel environment. Surprisingly, a comparable increase was observed in the probability of granule cells in the aged DG expressing zif268 during rest. Moreover, no significant age-related difference was observed in the number of granule cells expressing zif268 during rest. Thus, the number and pattern of granule cell expression of zif268 during rest is preserved in aged animals, despite a significant decline in exploration-related zif268 expression.CONCLUSIONS:These data lead to the hypothesis that the input the aged DG receives from backprojections from CA3 (the region widely hypothesized to mediate reactivation) remains functionally intact despite loss of innervation from the perforant path.