Down in the Dumps

I found myself with some spare cycles at work the other day, so I spent some time reading a few dumps created by our online production regions.

Does that make me weird?

There was a time that I found dumps to be both tedious and intimidating, but modern dump formatters have made it much easier to figure out what happened. For example, except in very rare cases, a Cobol programmer reading a dump no longer needs to know the register contents or indeed, what a register is.  Nor does the programmer have to know how to determine the instruction in error or how to find the program's BLW and BLL cells.  The dump formatter lays it all out for you.

I must hasten to add that interpreting a dump is still a challenging intellectual exercise because you need the ability to understand the application logic and have enough imagination to figure out how your data got into the state it is in.  In many cases you also require an intimate understanding of how your application interacts with its execution environment.

Thanks to the dump formatter, it only took me a few hours to diagnose a handful of problems that were responsible for about half of the abends in our application's online regions.   Were it not for the formatter, I probably would not have volunteered for the job.