Archive for November, 2016

Trace Analysis Patterns (Part 136)

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016

Considering and extending Trace Dimension to TID, ATID, and Time we use Poincaré section and Poincaré map analogies to introduce Poincaré Trace analysis pattern. We choose a value of one “coordinate”, for example, Time, and then form the new trace that consists of messages from different (A)TIDs that have the same timestamp as Time value or the last message(s) from other different ATIDs if they happened before section Time:

If we choose a different ATID than Time and TID, then Poincare Trace is equivalent to Adjoint Thread of Activity. If ATID is TID we have Thread of Activity as a trivial case. If we have Thread of Activity, we can choose some ATID and get Poincaré Trace as illustrated in the following diagram where the thick black line in the right Poincaré Trace represents Discontinuity and its Time Delta:

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

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Trace Analysis Patterns (Part 135)

Saturday, November 19th, 2016

There are messages in traces and logs that alone do not have useful information. These are adornments or ornamentation messages that we initially called Delineator or Separator messages that structure message stream or Figural Events (where we borrowed the name figural from Lyotard) such as formatting the next message with { }. Such messages only make meaning with other meaningful messages. We call this pattern Ornament. It helps in using trace analysis patterns and trace pattern identification.

Ornament can also be present inside individual messages, for example, as a character prefix. It can be a part of Message Invariant or variable itself. Some ornamentation can play a rhetorical function.

Although ornament is present in non-software architecture this concept has never been explored in pattern–oriented software architecture and construction. We propose similar concept for source code (software construction) in addition to ornamentation of its Declarative Trace. For software post-construction, we also add ornament part to software structure and behavior parts.

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

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Trace Analysis Patterns (Part 134)

Tuesday, November 15th, 2016

When we have hundreds of separate trace files from Split Trace and a smaller Split Trace with fewer files or just a single trace file that was recorded simultaneously (for example, a client from client-server environment) we can “project” the smaller Message Space into the larger Message Space as depicted in the following diagram:

This Projective Space analysis pattern can be used in conjunction with Indexical Trace where time interval can be used as an index into the larger Split Trace. Such projection may not be accurate but, assuming that the target trace Statement Current is uniform on average, can still be a very good heuristic instead of a binary search. For example, recently we had 4 sequential trace files for the client and 36 sequential files for the server. The software problem interval was specified in Basic Facts. We found that it in the second path of the 4th client trace. We, therefore, only inspected the last 4 traces of the 36 server sequential trace set and found it contained in the 35th server trace.

This pattern uses projective space metaphor from mathematics.

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

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