November 26, 2002
Forensic debuggers and visualisation
Gavin points to Green Hat Journal, who asks:
Imagine distributing an instrumented version of your program to 100 alpha customers. Every time the program commits an error, the user presses a button to generate a program trace and sends it to your server (WinXP does this for crashes, but they collect very little data). You collect hundreds of errors in a giant DB, with very detailed data on every program instance. Is it possible to automatically data mine these crashes to precisely identify the problem in the source code? I'll call this forensic debugging (FD).Yup. Done, deployed. Groove has this subsystem called CSM:
If a problem occurs, the Groove software automatically notifies Groove Networks' Customer Service Manager (CSM) server about the problem, and then works with it to fix the problem. The information transmitted to the CSM server includes the execution state of your computer at the time the problem occurred.I gather the database is pretty big. Now, mining that for long-term trends is one of a class of related things which interests me. How do error conditions manifest over time? How does a large source tree grow over time (whch areas have most churn, and how does that correlate to reliability)?
QVis could be a very interesting tool for this type of dataset. Must try it sometime.
vcard
| January 2005 | ||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
archives:
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
July 2002
June 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
February 2002
January 2002
December 2001
November 2001
October 2001
September 2001
August 2001
July 2001
June 2001
see also:
{groove:
[ ray,
matt,
paresh,
mike,
jeff,
john ],
other:
[ /* more blogroll to follow */ ]
}
The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
RSS 2.0
RSS 1.0
