Marked Message

Based on ideas of Roman Jakobson⁴⁶ about “marked” and “unmarked” categories we propose this pattern that groups trace messages based on having some feature or property. For example, marked messages may point to some domain of software activity such related to functional requirements and therefore may help in troubleshooting and debugging. Unmarked messages include all other messages that don't say anything about such activities (although may include messages pointing to such activities indirectly we unaware of) or messages that say explicitly that no such activity has occurred. We can even borrow a notation of distinctive features⁴⁷ from phonology⁴⁸ and annotate any trace or log after analysis to compare it with a master trace (Volume 6, page 247), for example, compose the following list of software trace distinctive features:

session database queries       [+]
session initialization         [-]
socket activity                [+]
process A launched             [+]
process B launched             [-]
process A exited               [-]
[...]

Here [+] means the activity is present in the trace and [-] means the activity is either undetected or definitely not present. Sometimes a non-present activity can be a marked activity corresponding to all inclusive unmarked present activity (see, for example, No Activity pattern, Volume 5, page 297).

⁴⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Jakobson

⁴⁷ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinctive_features

⁴⁸ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology