VSCode - CraTer

Introduction

CraTer is a light-weight fault localization extension for Java programs. Quite simply, when a program crashed, CraTer takes the Java program and corresponding crash stack trace as inputs and outputs whether or not the root-cause-line of the crash resides in the stack trace.

This extension is developed by Yongfeng Gu and Jifeng Xuan.

Usages

We first run the faulty program in VS Code then capture the stack trace from the Terminal. Finally, we predict the position of the crash root cause. Note that All the actions are selected from the right-click prompt. The main steps are as follows,

1. Select the Run in the right-click popup.

2. Select the Capture this stack trace in the right-click popup.

3. Select the Predict this Java crash in the right-click popup.

4. The detailed prediction results of CraTer is displayed in a new Webview window named CraTer Result.

Extension Settings

This extension contributes the following settings:

• crater.terminal: capture the stack trace from the terminal
• crater.predict: use CraTer to make predictions

Known Issues

At this time, it is known that CraTer has the following issues:

• CraTer only supports analyzing crashes of Java language, and other program languages will be supported in the next versions.
• CraTer only focus on analyzing the code in the src/ folder of your Java project. Hence, if your projects are built by Maven or Gradle, try to copy your code in the src/ folder.
• CraTer cannot analyze the 3rd-party libraries in the stack trace and may miss some valuable information about crashes, resulting in inaccurate prediction results or runtime crashes.

Release Notes

0.0.3

Fix some bugs and reconstruct the architecture of the extesion

0.0.2

Fix some bugs and optimize the CraTer results.

0.0.1

The initial release of CraTer which only focus on analyzing the Java crashes.