Software Diagnostics Report Schemes

Missing Cause Trace

Report schemes are important meta-patterns of monitoring and software problem analysis reports. It is often the case that we have software artifacts and some problem description and we need to provide recommendations on further troubleshooting. Most of the time such an analysis and associated response fit into abstract schemes where we can just substitute variables for concrete states, actions, artifacts and behavioral descriptions. Sometimes we also have difficulty to write such analysis reports so we hope report schemes is of help here to provide organizing templates for thought process.

Here's the first such scheme:

1. If Action then Behavior

2. We have a trace of Behavior

3. We need a trace of Action and Behavior

The difference with Truncated Trace (Volume 5, page 301) pattern here is that in a truncated trace it was intended to trace certain behavior but the tracing session was stopped prematurely or started too late. In a missing cause trace only a part of necessary activity was traced and the missing part wasn't thought of or considered for tracing.