Software Diagnostics Institute

Narrachain is an application of blockchain technology to software narratives, stories of computation, such as traces and logs including generalized traces such as memory dumps. Based on Software Narratology Square it also covers software construction narratives and, more generally, graphs (trees) of software narratives.

In case of software traces and logs, a blockchain-based software narrative may be implemented by adding an additional distributed trace that records the hash of a message block together with the hash of a previous block (a hash chain). This is depicted in the following diagram where Palimpsest Message appeared after the software narrative was growing for some time:

Performance considerations may affect the size of message blocks.

Narrachains can be used to prevent malnarratives and prove the integrity of software execution artifacts. The novel approach here is an integration of such a technology into a system of diagnostic analysis patterns (for example, problem description analysis patterns, trace and log analysis patterns, memory analysis patterns, unified debugging patterns). Narrascope, a narrative debugger, developed by Software Diagnostics Services, will include the support for NarraChain trace and log analysis pattern as well.

Narrachains can also be used for maintaining integrity of software support workflows by tracking problem information and its changes. For example, changes in problem description or newly found diagnostic indicators trigger invalidation of diagnostic analysis reports and re-evaluation of troubleshooting suggestions.