The Measure of Debugging and Memory Dump Analysis Complexity
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Recently I was asked how to measure complexity of technical support cases especially ones that require memory dump analysis. My first response was that it is a subjective qualitative measure based mostly on experience and feeling. However after careful consideration I understood that nothing has changed for the last 5 years: the nature and causes of system or application hangs and crashes still the same regardless of OS types and versions. Therefore the complexity measure shifts from a case description and its artifacts to an analyst, a memory dump reader. Here the number of queries, questions asked or commands executed to gather information for analysis, can be a good approximation to the measure of complexity. For example, 5 years ago I started with a few commands like !analyze -v, kv and dd and progressed to an elaborate checklist. Here the natural logarithm can be used to approximate the measure:
C = ln (Ndc), where Ndc is the number of debugging commands used.
Initially the complexity was ln(3) ≈ 1.1 and now if someone uses 10 commands on average or asks 10 questions the complexity is ln(10) ≈ 2.3. The analysis is more than 2 times complex than it was.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
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