Software troubleshooting and causal models
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Recently became interested in causality, causal models and how they can be applied to software troubleshooting especially when we have various traces and logs. Looking at traces, system and application event logs and logs from other tools, technical support engineers see correlations between various events and build causal models that are used to trace symptoms back to their causes. They use prior knowledge, assumptions, informed guessing and event order to discern causal structure. Clearly event order in logs influences that so it is important to understand how we think in causal terms in order to learn about our biases.
Another important question from software engineering perspective is how to design tracing components to help technical support and software maintenance engineers build correct causal models of software issues. Just finished reading a book about causal modeling:
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -