Debugging debugged, a metaphysical manifesto of systems integration

• Authors: Robert Schaefer
• Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
• Year: 2008

Systems designers will most often design to the N-1 criterion whether the designers know they are doing so or not. Systems designed to the N-1 criterion detect, isolate and (possibly) recover from at most one fault at a time. In contrast to the N-1 criterion, systems integrators must fault isolate in the presence of multiple simultaneous faults and in the absence of user guides. The purpose of this paper is to debug the debugging process used by systems integrators. To that end this paper describes the systems integration environment, identifies factors that drive the efficiency of that effort and provides a critique of the historical roots of architectural firewalls. (If there were no firewalls everything could theoretically interfere with everything else as only the stricture of time would prevent everything from happening at once. Yet a perfect firewall would be an impossibility; a Maxwell's demon of information.) This paper penultimately provides philosophical musings, a self-reflection on meanings uncovered. As this paper has strong non-linear content an attempt has been made for textual constraint by theme: I. The Systems Integration Environment II. An Efficient Systems Integration Efficiency Metric III. Architectural Investigations IV. the Problem Behind the Problem (tPBtP)