Lesson plan
Tracing (software)
Tracing in software engineering refers to the process of capturing and recording information about the execution of a software program. This information is typically used by programmers for debugging purposes, and additionally, depending on the type and detail of information contained in a trace log, by experienced system administrators or technical-support personnel and by software monitoring tools to diagnose common problems with software. Tracing is a cross-cutting concern. There is not always a clear distinction between tracing and other forms of logging, except that the term tracing is almost never applied to logging that is a functional requirement of a program (therefore excluding logging of data from an external source, such as data acquisition in a high-energy physics experiment, and write-ahead logging). Logs that record program usage (such as a server log) or operating-system events primarily of interest to a system administrator (see for example Event Viewer) fall into a terminological gray area. Tracing is primarily used for anomaly detection, fault analysis, debugging or diagnostic purposes in distributed software systems, such as microservices or serverless functions.
Article summary
Tracing in software engineering refers to the process of capturing and recording information about the execution of a software program. This information is typically used by programmers for debugging purposes, and additionally, depending on the type and detail of information contained in a trace log, by experienced system administrators or technical-support personnel and by software monitoring tools to diagnose common problems with software. Tracing is a cross-cutting concern. There is not always a clear distinction between tracing and other forms of logging, except that the term tracing is almost never applied to logging that is a functional requirement of a program (therefore excluding logging of data from an external source, such as data acquisition in a high-energy physics experiment, and write-ahead logging). Logs that record program usage (such as a server log) or operating-system events primarily of interest to a system administrator (see for example Event Viewer) fall into a terminological gray area. Tracing is primarily used for anomaly detection, fault analysis, debugging or diagnostic purposes in distributed software systems, such as microservices or serverless functions.
Key claims
No claims recorded.
Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
No sources recorded.
Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.