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Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Source Code?


Root-cause defect analysis tools extend debugging to deployed production environments

By David Rubinstein
June 1, 2002 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Some people consider root-cause analysis solutions to be the barium of the software industry-inject it into your production systems, and follow it all the way through the runtime tract to trace problems plaguing application performance.

Recent solutions show the differing approaches companies take to solving the problem as well as the various labels vendors attach to these tools-whether it's called fault management, root-cause analysis, probable-cause analysis or performance and availability management.

Jeff Mulligan, marketing vice president at InCert Software Corp. (www.incert.com), which sells the Halo and TrackBack analysis tools, cited a study that claimed 40 percent of all unplanned downtime in a production system is due to a software failure. "But we're still trying to solve the problem the same way we did 20 years ago. You can't replicate an eBay in the lab."

The notion of root-cause analysis is a fairly new one, used to augment testing and debugging done in preproduction environments. The past several years have seen quite a few companies entering the market, offering production-environment execution analysis and fault-finding tools for Java, Windows and other platforms.

The technologies used in these tools vary; some use a logging approach, monitoring and recording changes to variables and memory locations; others set breakpoints or trace execution as activity jumps from module to module, or from application to application.

Ironically, according to Oliver Cole, CEO of OC Systems Inc. (www.ocsystems.com), which sells a tool called RootCause, this approach may actually lead to poorer software being created. "Even five years ago, the focus was not getting bugs into the field. We had function-point testing and other methods, until people realized getting rid of bugs completely will never happen. If companies can get a handle on problems in the production environment, they'll pay less attention to bugs. It could result in [lower-quality] software."

It was the maturity and complexity of distributed application platforms, as well as a wider adoption of standards, that has allowed root-cause analysis to grow, said Bob Ure, director of marketing at Altaworks Corp. (www.altaworks.com), which offers the Panorama tool. "For instance, J2EE defines how applications can and should be built," he said. "Monitoring and management of components in a J2EE environment is easier because we know what to expect from them."

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