Automatically Create Test Scripts from a Debugging Session

With one click, Multiplayer now turns debugging sessions into test scripts that capture:

• Every API call, payload, and header
• The exact sequence that triggered the failure
• A live, editable Notebook your team can run, test, and verify

Distributed Debugging Stages

"Debugging" is often used as a broad umbrella term. It covers everything from realizing something's broken to confirming it's fixed. But when engineers talk about debugging as a process, they often break it into stages. Especially when thinking about complex, distributed systems.

Here’s how engineers typically break it down:

1. Detection - “Something’s wrong.”

You spot an alert, error message, customer support ticket, unexpected behavior, or test failure. You know there’s a problem, but not much more.

2. Root Cause Analysis - “Why is this happening?”

This is often the hardest part of debugging, because you need to find what’s actually broken (the “what”, “when”, “why” and ”how”), not just the symptom.

In distributed systems, it gets tricky fast: logs, traces, metrics, recent deployments, and tribal knowledge must all be pieced together. Issues can span services, teams, or even regions—and the point of failure is rarely where the symptoms show up.

3. Reproduction - “Can I trigger this reliably?”

Before you can fix a bug, you need to understand it. And that often means reproducing it.

But distributed systems introduce complexity: timing issues, race conditions, and load-sensitive behaviors can make bugs intermittent and hard to isolate. Reproduction may require mocks, test harnesses, or simulated environments that reflect the exact state of the system at the time of failure.

4. Resolution - “Let’s fix it.”

Finding a fix is often a trial and error approach and might require coordination across multiple service owners. Fixes can span application logic, infrastructure, deployment configs, or third-party systems.

Given that issues in distributed systems are often caused by multiple root causes coming together as a perfect, unpredictable storm, developers need to have full visibility of how any change will affect the overall systems and all downstream dependencies. One change in a service can affect dozens of others.

5. Verification - “Did we fix it?”

Once fixed, you need to make sure it stays fixed.

This often means replaying the scenario, running regression tests, and monitoring closely to ensure nothing else broke along the way. In distributed systems it’s a continuous process of validation under real-world conditions.

Common downsides in traditional bug reproduction and resolution

In previous articles we’ve covered the challenges of identifying root causes in distributed systems. But even after detection, developers often face major roadblocks during reproduction and resolution:

• Test bias and incomplete coverage: Engineers naturally write tests based on assumptions or imagined failure paths. This often misses real-world bugs, especially those triggered by edge cases or unpredictable system behavior.
• High maintenance cost: As products evolve, test scripts quickly become outdated or time-consuming to write manually. Keeping them current consumes time that could be better spent on development or testing itself.
• Hard-to-reproduce bugs: Some failures rely on specific timing, state, or data conditions that are hard to replicate outside of production.
• Poor collaboration and visibility: Reproduction steps are often buried in Slack threads, untracked documents, or someone’s local setup; slowing down teamwork and increasing risk.
• Retroactive test creation is hard: After fixing a bug creating a useful test from memory is time-consuming and often misses critical context.
• Limited protection against regressions: Without accurate, reproducible tests tied to past bugs, it’s easy to accidentally reintroduce issues during future changes.

The result? With traditional approaches, engineering teams are forced to weigh the time and effort to build a test script against the time it takes to manually verify the bug, factoring in not just engineering hours, but lost momentum and opportunity cost.

Auto-generated, runnable test scripts

Multiplayer’s deep debugging session replays allow developers to quickly and accurately identify the root cause(s): we capture everything you need to understand a bug—from frontend screens, backend traces, metrics, logs and full request/response content and headers—in a single, sharable link.

But that’s only half the equation: now they have to reproduce it and resolve it.

That’s why we’re introducing the ability to generate a Notebook directly from a deep session replay of your bug. This auto-generates a runnable test script—complete with real API calls, payloads, and code logic—that mirrors the failure path.

This bridges the gap between observation and action.

With this release, developers can:

• Reproduce issues effortlessly: Notebooks capture the exact sequence of API calls, headers, edge-case logic, and system behavior that led to the bug, making it easy to simulate and understand the issue.
• Collaborate with full context: Share a complete, interactive snapshot of the bug. No more guessing, re-explaining, or syncing across tools—everyone immediately understands the problem and can test it themselves.
• Verify fixes immediately: Modify API or code blocks to test potential fixes. Re-run the Notebook to confirm your patch resolves the bug before shipping. It acts like a unit or integration test, but targeted to the exact failure path.
• Document real behavior: Use Notebooks to record how systems actually behave in production, including edge cases and unexpected flows. Great for onboarding, audits, or future reference.
• Prevent regressions: Re-run the Notebook after code changes to ensure the bug stays fixed. It acts like a custom, high-fidelity regression test, built straight from the incident.

Design, documentation, debugging: they’re not separate problems

Most developer tools are built to solve one narrow slice of the workflow—frontend replay, backend tracing, API docs, diagrams.

But bugs don’t live in silos. To understand and resolve an issue, you need:

• Full-stack context, across frontend and backend
• Real-time visibility into architecture and dependencies
• Accurate documentation
• Awareness of past design decisions

In practice, that means jumping across APM tools, hunting through stale diagrams, outdated docs, and Slack threads—before you can even start fixing the bug.

Multiplayer gives you one environment for designing reliable systems and resolving issues fast.

Because the best way to fix bugs is to avoid them in the first place. And the second-best way is to understand everything that led to them.

That’s why we support:

• Collaborative system and API design: Design APIs and architectures in a shared, interactive space that supports early collaboration, alignment, and clarity, before code is written.
• Auto-documentation: Automatically generate always-accurate system docs and diagrams—architecture, APIs, dependencies, and flows—so your team can fully understand their system and move faster when things break.

Try Multiplayer now

Multiplayer ties it all together: fast root cause analysis, auto-generated test scripts, and full system-wide context. So you can move from “what happened” to “it’s fixed” without friction.

Our auto-generated test scripts help eliminate:

• Guesswork in reproducing bugs
• Time spent building brittle test environments
• Gaps in communication and handoffs
• The risk of forgetting what actually happened

They don’t just help you fix the bug, they leave you with a runnable, verifiable notebook that prevents it from coming back.

Ready to debug smarter? Discover the impact of Multiplayer for your team with a free 30-day trial of all our features.