Message Logging

I’ve recently written a new message-logging system for my company and wrote up a bunch of thoughts on the subject into a white paper, Message Logging. The abstract is below:

“Discusses the requirements of software logging, relative to the needs of different types of users of a product. Outlines the goals of a logging system with respect to these users and provides guidelines and a set of rules for providing good self-documenting software components and processes. Sending messages and handling messages are best kept completely separate, leaving the task of documenting to the components themselves, and the task of filtering and recording to the end-user or intermediate developer. In addition, whereas messages contain their own description, including originating component and level (or type), there also needs to be a mechanism to allow compositions of software components to further group unrelated messages received from their sub-components.”