Phenomenology of Software Diagnostics: A First Sketch
Influenced by stages of Husserlian135 phenomenological investigation we propose the following stages for the investigation of phenomena as it appears in software execution artifacts such as memory dumps, traces and logs:
1. Bracketing the outside source code as reduction to patterns of phenomena independent from causal software engineering explanations.
2. Constructing the computational world for the given incident (the so called horizon of computation).
3. Comparing with “computed-in” experience of past computational worlds from which all universal patterns of computational structural and behavioral phenomena emerged.
According to the above software diagnostics is a phenomenological science of patterns. Here's a funny coincidence. The first step in a phenomenological method is the so called epoché. We provide our own interpretation of this - “exception processing of crash” hypothetical episteme. This sounds similar to EPOCH (Volume 4, page 271) metaphysical grand conjecture that our World is just one enormous exception processing handler after Big Bang.