My QA team is creating recordings for debugging manually, using VMWorkstation. There are two possible sequences to do so:

1. Start the recording then
2. Start the application

which means the 'CreateProcess' event is contained in the recording, or

1. Start the application then
2. Start the recording.

which means, the 'CreateProcess' event is not contained in the recording. The recording starts with my application already running.

I have not managed to make replay-debugging work with the second order of events. When I try to debug that recording, it will start playback with my application running, but the VMWare Debug Plugin never finds the process inside the recording.

Am I right in my assumption that the VMWare Debug Plugin looks for the starting of my application inside the recording? And so I cannot debug applications that have already started when the recording begins?

Or is there something I am missing?

My QA team wants to use this feature to report bugs. Moving around a couple of GB is pretty cumbersome and sometimes they would like to start recording only later, some time into their testing session, even if that might mean we're possibly missing the cause of a bug.

BTW, I watched your talk on Google Talk and someone from the audience suggested a trigger and pre-trigger recording, where the system would on a failed testcase created a recording of the last 'n' minutes leading up to the failure. I really can't wait to get my hands on this, it would be extremely helpful for us.

A little more on our setup. I am working with Windows almost exlusively, but we also have several linux guys. We write software with many custom protocols with external hardware connected via ethernet. We are also desiging the hardware. I am sure you can imagine how much help this would be to us, not just for debugging the software on the PC but for debugging our hardware as well.

Best regards

Hajo