DEVOPSdigest

Rookout announced new functionality that empowers software developers to debug other people’s code.

Traditionally, when trying to arrive at the root cause of an issue, running into 3rd party code presents a number of challenges. Fundamentally, this is code that the developer herself did not write, making it that much more difficult to understand. Rookout provides X-ray vision into these 3rd party dependencies that software developers are used to experiencing as black boxes.

“Debugging becomes even more difficult when you run into code that you didn’t write -- which in today’s modern distributed environments can be the large majority of code keeping the application running,” said Liran Haimovitch, CTO and Co-Founder of Rookout. “Before today, even adding a log line to one of those 3rd party dependencies seemed like an insurmountable task, but that is all changing with our newly released functionality.”

Rookout is installed as an SDK and deployed in every running instance of the application. The SDK performs bytecode manipulation, gaining direct access to running code frames as the application runs. This allows the Rookout SDK to fetch the value of local variables, stack traces, and metadata about the running application. The unique implementation offered by Rookout means this data can be fetched even when the software engineer didn’t build the application herself or has no access to the source code.