Good software engineers write good software trace statements. Good software support engineers and responsible customers trace^[30] software wisely, enabling it at the right time and in the right quantities. The following preliminary article was written to help to trace software effectively to result in faster problem resolution via trace analysis: Tracing Best Practices (http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx121185)

Tracing Best Practices (http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx121185)

Although, at the time of this writing it's geared towards CDF tracing in Citrix terminal services environment, these recommendations can be generalized to other traces as well and the article will be extended over time.

Let's define a software or computer narratology as an application of the theory and methods of literary narratology^[31] to the domain of software execution where software traces and logs are considered as a narrative, the story of a computation (*). As an example, we have the following correspondence between 4-tiers of literary and software narrative models:

Events            Instructions, statements, functions
History           Concrete execution path
Narrative         Software trace
Presentation      View (from a trace viewer)

(*) Please do not confuse software narratology with computational narratology^[32].