Archive for February 2nd, 2012

Narralog - A Software Trace Modeling Language

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Forthcoming Accelerated Software Trace Analysis training requires extensive real life like software logs with multiple software behaviour patterns. The similar accelerated memory dump analysis trainings (unmanaged / native Windows and .NET) also required good memory dumps but this problem was solved by modeling patterns of abnormal software behaviour in an appropriate implementation language such as C++ and C#. Modeling software traces with hundreds of software components, processes and threads would require enormous programming efforts. Therefore, the natural approach is to describe a desired software trace in some declarative language (or minimally imperative) and get a million line software log that models a specific combination of trace analysis patterns. So, welcome to such a language called Narralog: Software Narrative Log  or Narrative Logic. Please note that this language is different from Riemann programming language which is a language to describe software problems and generate software problem solving tools. Language details and whether a kind of a Metadefect Template Library will be used to implement Narralog or simple macroprogramming is suffice will be decided and announced when we further develop our training.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

Narremes in Software Narratology

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

John Randall’s blog about narratology and narremes suggested me to elaborate on a basic software trace (log) unit. One candidate is a trace message invariant, a skeleton trace message similar to a format string. There is also a corresponding software trace analysis pattern called Message Invariant. Although, this might be too an elementary unit akin to a sentence level and another candidate is a macromessage, a combination of several messages serving some semantic function. There is a corresponding general pattern Macrofunction and an example concrete analysis pattern called Exception Stack Trace. The actual software narreme might be situated between these two extremes: invariants and macrofunctions.

If you are new to a software narratology field please look at these posts placed in chronological order (except a pattern catalog):

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -