Re: ANNOUNCE: DTraq First Public Release

[Guillaume Foliard <guifo@wanadoo.fr>]

Pascal Obry wrote:
> "Marc A. Criley" <marc@mckae.com> writes:
>> DTraq is a data logging and playback debugging tool providing near
>> realtime data logging and analysis to aid debugging and validation.
>> Captured, or 'tapped' data from a program can be viewed live while the
>> program is running or, since it is being logged to a file, played back
>> or printed out later for off-line review and analysis.
> 
> I've never used nor seen such a tool. Can you provides more information
> about what it can be used for ? How can it helps debugging ?

I'm using such a tool at work, which has been developped in-house. It allows
you to record during execution data messages (effective parameters, data
going through a network connection, etc...) and to analyse them afterwards. 
The important part there is not to record the data but to interpret it
without having to type millions line of Put procedure by hand. This is a
two step process. First you need an Ada parser to analyse the data
structure of what you want to record and to generate all the Ada code
needed to access and display those structures. Then this code will be used
in other applications for displaying, plotting, etc...
From my own experience with such a tool, and with the help of a good
software design, more than 90 percent of the defects are resolved by just
reading the inputs and the outputs and the involded code, without any
debugger. This is indeed possible because of the natural safety of Ada.
When bug occur we can generally safely ignore all the low-level bugs C
programmers are familiar with to focus on the functionnal stuff.

By the way, http://www.mckae.com/dtraq.html is unreachable.