Existential Prognostics: Periodic Table of Diagnostic Patterns

One of the features of the Periodic Table of Elements was the prediction of missing elements. In November 2010 we announced the discovery of the Periodic Table of Software Defects as “rules that make it possible to devise a memory dump and software trace analysis equivalent of the Periodic Table of Elements in Chemistry. It allows prediction of abnormal software behavior and structural defects and what patterns to look for after deploying software and collecting its artifacts”.

The publication of the second edition of Encyclopedia of Crash Dump Analysis Patterns makes it possible to see what patterns are expected in your favorite operating system and software product even if they have not been observed or cataloged yet (see its Table of Contents). This is why we call this type of prognostics existential as affirming or implying the existence of a diagnostic pattern, whether it is a problem pattern or problem analysis pattern.

As an example, we can tell the story of pattern prediction and discovery. An engineer expressed the doubt about the existence of Lateral Damage crash dump analysis pattern for Linux systems since he had never observed it during his diagnostic practice. Years passed, and it was recently observed and cataloged when analyzing Linux process core dumps.