The hardest step in locating software bugs centers on working backward from a failure to the error that caused it. Conventional debugging techniques do not make it easy to find the cause of an error as they only allow you to control program execution in the forward direction. They make you use time consuming and unreliable methods to attempt to identify where the problem occurred.

Instead of going back to the beginning to try and recreate the conditions of a problem, ReplayEngine lets you start from the point of failure and work backward in time to find the cause. Recreating the conditions of a crash, which is sometimes the hardest problem in conventional forward debugging, is no longer necessary. You can now move to locate errors that occurred long before the failure they caused.

ReplayEngine is embedded within TotalView, which means you must know how to use TotalView. If you've never used TotalView, you should go to the TotalView page on our web site at http://www.totalviewtech.com for information.