In the current state of debugging, there are bugs which exceed the capabilities of conventional online debuggers. When developers have to inspect past states of programs in order to solve them, they often have to restart the applications to be able to analyze the states live instead of inspecting them retrospectively. Omniscient debugging offers back-in-time debugging capabilities by recording full runs of applications, at the cost of scalability.

In this work we present an in-between approach called back-in-time evaluation that extends online debuggers with back-in-time capabilities. Instead of tracing full runs, the lifetime of the stored events are reduced to the scope of the methods they are executed in, which incurs a runtime overhead of only a few percent.