Troubleshooting is a process and an activity that one never wants to go through since there is never a good time for a problem to occur. However, gaining better skills in problem determination, problem analysis and problem solving is a valuable discipline. This topic aims to give you a general understanding of a structured problem determination approach, which you can apply while using the Rational Software Development Platform.
Your success in eliminating a problem depends on a few factors:
When you are confronted with any software problem a basic troubleshooting strategy involves the following steps:
Depending on the type of problem you are having whether it be with your application, your server or your application development tools you will likely receive a message that will give you indication that something is wrong. If you are developing an application, Rational Developer will give you various validation messages in the Tasks view that will tell you if you have made a development error. In any situation, grab a pen and record the error message that you see. As simple as this sounds, error messages sometimes contain cryptic codes that might make more sense as you investigate your problem further. You might also receive multiple error messages that look similar but have fine differences. By recording the details of each one you may learn more about where your problem exists.
Think back to what steps you were doing that led you to this problem. Try those steps again to see if this problem is easily recreated. If you have a consistently repeatable test case, you will have an easier time determining what solutions are necessary.
You can search live, Web-based support resources by
using the
IBM Support Assistant located in your Help menu. This tool will help you search IBM's knowledgebases to see whether your problem is already documented.
Beyond these steps, your knowledge of the tools or technology that
you are working with will also help you narrow the possible reasons why
things are not working.
If you have researched the resources that are available to you and still find that you are experiencing this problem there are tools available in the product that may give you more diagnostic information. Learn about the various debugging, profiling, tracing and testing tools in this product by looking in the Help.
Related tasks
Searching
knowledge bases
Getting
fixes
Contacting
IBM Software Support