Addressees of Trace Messages 

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

●      Support engineers

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

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

○       Is it a new problem never faced before?

In both cases, the support engineer needs enough information to be able to distinguish these two areas. Normally, information about the program flow (the current part of the code being processed), combined with information about the program context (the current status of the program) has to be enough to classify the problem. All this has to be combined with information about the software and if necessary, the hardware component versions and attributes. The version information is mostly provided in other tools and does not need 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.

●      Developers

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