Debugging Software

Anyone who follows the complicated and arcane world of patents understands the controversy surrounding what are known as “process” patents. Unlike patents for genuine breakthroughs like the light bulb or the transistor, process patents provide protection for weighty concepts like pricing an item on an e-commerce site or attaching a graphics file to a manufacturing procedure. Nothing wrong with this kind of innovation but not exactly rocket science and not particularly unique.

We just announced (http://www.replaysolutions.com/company/news/62) our third patent award covering various foundational elements of our application record and replay technology. This is rocket science and the technology is definitely unique.

Capturing and managing the literally thousands of non-deterministic conditions that an application can exhibit and replicating them on playback with 100% fidelity is an extremely challenging technical task. The fact that we have already been awarded three patents with nine more pending is fitting testament to the technical achievement of the Replay engineering team.
I salute our engineers for producing truly valuable inventions that have advanced the state-of-the-art for a wide range of application monitoring and diagnostic technologies. Great use of the patent system.

When the United States fell asleep at the wheel in terms of product quality, one of the “re-awakenings” came in the form of a book called Quality is Free by Phil Crosby. His core principle was that any investment in quality improvement would return more than the program’s cost in terms of organization efficiency and customer satisfaction. Hence the title of his book.
Our co-founder Jonathan Lindo is currently the featured columnist for Sticky Minds (http://www.stickyminds.com/) where he discusses the economics of software quality in the context of automated testing. Based on the experiences and feedback from our customers, Jonathan has done an excellent job of highlighting changes that are driving software testing to increased levels of automation and a “time and motion” breakdown of the costs of software defects throughout the find and fix process. Given the time and resources tied up in documenting, communicating, replicating and diagnosing a defect, there is a great deal of savings to be had in improving the process.
The article has already received very thoughtful and supportive feedback, mostly along the lines that the cost estimates may be too conservative. If that’s the case, software quality is even “free-er” than we thought.

The networking folks do amazing things when they have the information they need to diagnose issues and make decisions. They use Deep Packet Inspection to inform everything from bandwidth management, equipment outages and security because DPI gives them the absolute ground truth about their network’s behavior.

We’ve just introduced ReplayDIRECTOR 3.5 and while dot releases are not typically something to shout about, this release represents the front edge of our “Deep Application Inspection” initiative that will deliver the same kind of ground truth for application execution that Deep Packet Inspection provides for the network.

RD 3.5 takes our log viewing and amplification capabilities available in the Eclipse IDE and exposes the details in our standard web UI along with information highlighting defect markers, transactions, users and even client screen shots. In upcoming releases we will be adding a wide variety of deep execution detail to the log view and exposing that data not only in our web UI, but in IDE’s and dashboards of complementary diagnostic and profiling products that provide management information across the software development lifecycle.

Because we see and replicate every method call, exception, db call, variable value, code sequence, etc. there is no more precise and comprehensive record of program execution. Deep Application Inspection is the engine for the diagnostic train and everyone from Dev to QA to Security to Operations can get on board to advance their mission of producing and maintaining high-quality, reliable business solutions.