Addressees of Trace Messages 

Since traces require a deep understanding of the traced entity, only the following groups are addressed:

·        Development support

A typical development support engineer has considerable understanding of how an application or technical component/subcomponent works and how it is implemented in principal. He uses this know-how to distinguish at least the following two kinds of a problem:

Ў        Is it an already known problem (with a solution available)?

Ў        Is it a new problem never faced before?

In both cases he needs enough information to be able to distinguish these two cases. Normally, information about the program flow (what part of the code is processed at the moment?) combined with information about the program context (in which status is the program and what is semantically done at the moment?) has to be enough to classify the problem – combined with the information about the software component versions (and if necessary also the hardware component versions and attributes). The version information is normally provided in other tools and needs not to be included in traces again.

In case of a new problem, the localization of the problems origin is the critical task, since it is related to the task of finding the responsible developer for fixing the problem.

·        Developer

Traces must help developers understand the program flow and context of an application without the effort of analyzing each single statement.