Software Diagnostics Institute

When introducing software data codiagnostics we mentioned artifact transformations through data analysis patterns. Such analysis patterns were devised for human-assisted data diagnostics (for example, software log analysis) and may be too coarse and high-level for formalization and software implementation. Some of them may be split into more elementary transformations which are composable in an associative way. Some may have multiple artifact inputs and additional parameters. All these suggested a name for such transformations based on the analogy with operads in mathematics: a diagnostic operad. However, this name is a different portmanteau of "operations" and "diagnostics". "Historically, the theoretical study of compositions of operations appeared in the 1950s in the work of Michel Lazard as analyseurs"^*.

The preliminary definition for our purposes is:

A diagnostic operad is a sequence of diagnostic operations required to extract diagnostic indicators in a diagnostic process described by diagnostic analysis patterns.

Such a sequence may involve operations from different analysis patterns. This is illustrated in the following diagram:

The operadic approach resembles Elementary Analysis Patterns introduced earlier for memory artifact analysis, but the latter include operations which do not transform or query artifacts. Perhaps diagnostic operads should include some of such operations formalized in a way to make them applicable to other types of artifacts such as logs.

^* Jean-Louis Loday, Bruno Vallette, Algebraic Operads, page vii (ISBN: 978-3642448355)