Crash Dump Analysis

DebugWare Patterns: A Case Study (Part 1)

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Suppose we want to write a support tool to troubleshoot a frequent software problem. Would we start with GUI? Most tools are command line tools and we therefore choose Tool Façade pattern to decouple GUI from CLI:

By making our GUI optional we postpone its development until later implementation phase when we want to beautify or simplify the tool user interface. The troubleshooting of software problem we want to automate is quite complex, scattered across several knowledge base articles, with many troubleshooting steps and various checks. We therefore treat different steps as TUWs, Troubleshooting Units of Work (aggregating related ones if necessary) and choose Checklist pattern to coordinate them:

Initially we think that just one checklist is suffice but while studying the domain of troubleshooting we find that the problem usually spans client and server computers, where servers sometimes have client roles as well and different troubleshooting steps and checks are needed. In order to simplify the tool we apply Span Differentiator pattern and our architectural UML component diagram becomes more refined:

We also see that different TUW use similar operations like querying registry values or checking whether certain processes are running and factor them out into separate SMs, Supporting Modules:

Deployment methods are important in troubleshooting where it is not always desirable to change configuration on production servers and we plan for optional Self Extractor pattern:

In diagrams we liberally mixed component and static UML diagramming elements. We also need to design a uniform interface that each TUW module exposes to the main tool coordinator module but we leave it for the part 2.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -