Software Diagnostics Institute

Should software diagnostics stand alone as a separate, distinct diagnostics or be a part of some other diagnostics? We considered initially 3 types of diagnostics: medical, technical, and software:

The objects of medical diagnostics are obviously humans and mostly their biological artefacts (we say mostly because linguistic and textual artifacts can also be used for diagnosis). The objects of technical diagnostics are structures and systems made from natural and artificial organic and inorganic engineering materials (Handbook of Technical Diagnostics: Fundamentals and Application to Structures and Systems, ISBN: 978-3642258497, pp. 11 – 16). The objects of software diagnostics are obviously software systems.

We define software diagnostics as “a discipline studying abnormal software structure and behavior in software execution artefacts (such as memory dumps, software and network traces and logs)” (Introduction to Philosophy of Software Diagnostics, Part 1, page 7) or, more generally, to include the context of forensics as “a discipline studying signs of software structure and behavior in software execution artefacts (such as memory dumps, software and network traces and logs)” (Pattern-Oriented Software Forensics: A Foundation of Memory Forensics and Forensics of Things, page 18).

Although, there are many conceptual similarities in general between these diagnostics, there are three features of software that set software diagnostics apart:

• A software system or its artefact can be copied.
• The software can be its own model. This follows from the previous feature since we can copy the software execution state and then study the effects of its execution independently. However, it is possible to have different software models for diagnostics as, for example, in Projective Debugging.
• Software execution artefacts are both symbolic and digital.

There are also humanistic artefacts (A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present, ISBN: 978-0199665211) such text (including historical documents), language, literature, and music which are symbolic and digital or can be digitised. Diagnostics takes the form of literary criticism and text reconstruction (philology). Many similarities there gave rise to Software Narratology and Systemic Software Diagnostics: