Rookout Touts X-Ray Vision for Rapid Debugging

January 20, 2021

Rookout developed new functionality that empowers software developers to debug other people’s code for the first time. 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.”

In today’s world, where more and more people are working remotely, the ability to even jump over to a colleague’s desk has become reduced. The distance between the developer and the code they are debugging is even wider when it’s code written by a former employee, an open source framework, or even 3rd party proprietary code. According to Jason Bloomberg, President and Principal Analyst at Intellx, “An understandability tool like Rookout brings information about the running software in production to developers, providing visibility into how individual lines of code impact the behavior of running software.”

“These modern applications consist of multiple software objects running across multiple runtime environments. As a result, tracking down a bug in a particular line of code becomes that much more difficult as compared to a monolithic application,” continues Bloomberg. “The connection between individual lines of code and the behavior of all software running in production is thus tenuous at best. Tracking down bugs has just become far trickier.”

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.

According to IDC, a premier analyst firm researching technology trends in over 100 countries, in their report titled Worldwide Developer and DevOps 2020 Predictions, they write that “re-use of third-party code in new apps and digital solutions will increase from 40% in 2020 to 80% of code in 2024.” Arnal Dayaratna, Research Director in software development for IDC, says about Rookout: “One of the challenges faced by contemporary developers is the task of understanding applications that they may not have even developed or used -- Rookout empowers developers to truly understand the applications that they are debugging.”

"The future of software lies in cutting down on deployment, reducing CI/CD strain, and speeding development and the delivery of new features," said John Kodumal, CTO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly. "With Rookout, the data you need is available with just a click."