Research On Instrumentation For Binary Code Debugging And Testing

The research on the off-the-shelf binary format software products is a hot issue and trend in both academic and industrial fields, such as increasing their dependability, extending their functions, patching and so on. To insure the software quality based on the demand of software engineering, it's necessary to test and debug the modified binary format programs. However, there isn't any mature automatic code instrumentation tool used for binary code debugging and testing.Firstly, we review all kinds of code instrumentation techniques and research some representative instrumentation function libraries. We also analyse their advantages, shortcomings and application fields. Secondly, we analysis the specific code instrumentation requirement of software debugging and testing in details and design template based on XML which describes the requirements. The paper presents an idea which automatically instruments the binary files depend on the user's requirements and designs some automatic instrumentation templates associated with different requirements. Furthermore, we design and implement an automatic instrumentation tool, called DIAIT, which is used for digging debugging and testing information for Java bytecode programs. DIAIT consists of four modules, namely key Controller, Requirement Parser, Automatic Code Instrumentation Machine and Template Library. Finally, we run and analysis the DIAIT with a sample program.The DIAIT tool presented in the paper supports the Java bytecode debugging and testing and gives great convenience to both testing and debugging people. DIAIT increases the efficiency of both software debugging and testing and also makes contributions to the debugging and testing of binary format programs.