Software Diagnostics Library

It is not about me. It is the reciprocal counterpart to Five golden rules of troubleshooting. Whereas the former are for artefact submitters, internal and external customers of memory dump analysts and complex trace readers, I‘m RARE are rules for writing analysis reports with easy to remember mnemonic:

I‘m RARE  - Iridium Rules of Analysis Report Excellence

Note about Iridium metal from Wikipedia: “It is one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust, with annual production and consumption of only three tonnes.” 

Here is the draft number 5 of them (subject to change in the forthcoming weeks):

1. Use a template.

2. Structure a report according to audience technical level and organizational processes.

3. Use checklists not only for commands and tools but also for things to avoid in reports and things to encourage.

4. Put all relevant data for later search and for other engineers to reproduce the analysis.

5. Provide appropriate explanations and narrative in the cases where analysis is inconclusive.

This also needs to be integrated with PARTS methodology. 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Announcements, Crash Dump Analysis, Debugging, Software Technical Support, Troubleshooting Methodology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.