Macrobug Stray Event Scanner

The Macrobug Stray Event Scanner is the only tool which can save weeks of effort fixing the dreaded "stray event panic". Every Symbian OS device creation engineer knows that the appearance of such a panic means hours of effort to try to find the cause - which might not even be possible. This tool highlights all the situations in your source code which could possibly be the source of such a bug.

About stray events

If you hear a Symbian OS engineer saying "oh, no!" then you know they've probably found a "stray event" panic. A stray event panic is where a thread receives an event it wasn't expecting - and therefore it crashes. But minutes or hours might have passed since the erroneous code executed. There's usually no evidence of what the problem was, so diagnosing a stray event usually means reading the source code to try to spot the cause of the problem. Time is money, and if you have a customer breathing down your neck, it's your reputation too.

No longer. Macrobug's Stray Event Scanner reads your source code and spots any situation which could lead to a stray event problem. (As a bonus it also spots situations which could lead to various other panics and freezes). The results appear in the Carbide.c++ development environment, right where the engineers need them.

Example engineering time saving

Over a five-month period during a particular Symbian OS phone development project.

		Without Stray Event Scanner	With Stray Event Scanner
Stray event panics found		32
Of which	Duplicates	23
Of which	Unique problems	9
Estimated time to diagnose each unique problem		6 hours	10 minutes
Estimated time to solve each duplicate problem (to work out it's a duplicate)		3 hours	10 minutes
Total time spent diagnosing Stray Event problems		123 hours	5.3 hours
Time saving over five months			117.7 hours
Time saving over a year			282.4 hours
Estimated cost saving over a year (assuming a cheap contractor!)			Ł12,708

Read our white paper for the source of these numbers and more details about the importance of different panic types.

How does it work? The source code is parsed using a modified version of the industry-standard compiler, GCC, so there are no concerns that it won't work on your source code. The standard Symbian OS build system is used to perform the parsing, so there are also no concerns that it won't work with your build environment. The parsed code is then analysed to find out what requests each function makes - and to check that it prepares itself to receive a reply. If there are any mismatches, an error is attached to the source code in the Carbide.c++ IDE.

Features

Three interfaces:
- Carbide.c++ IDE graphical user interface
- Command-line interface
- Java application programming interface
Easy pop-up options in Carbide.c++ to scan code, and even to request that your code is scanned each time you build it.
Descriptive error messages shown attached to the erroneous source code
Problems listed alongside other compile errors in standard Carbide problems view
Problem Detail View available listing the circumstances under which each problem occurs (usually obscure!) and what requests and waits the tool considers relevant
Tool can spot all kinds of code-flow problems which can cause stray events, including 'ifs', 'leaves', 'switch-case', and C++ exceptions.

Technology

The tool uses the standard Symbian build system to build the code, and GCC to parse the C++ - so it should have no problems coping with your code.

Pricing

Please see our Purchasing page.

Open source

The Stray Event Scanner makes use of the open-source GCCXML project. See our Open Source page to download the improvements and other changes we've made to GCCXML.

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