@@ -31,6 +31,7 @@ A checklist for bcc tool development:
1.**Measure the overhead of the tool**. If you are running a micro-benchmark, how much slower is it with the tool running. Is more CPU consumed? Try to determine the worst case: run the micro-benchmark so that CPU headroom is exhausted, and then run the bcc tool. Can overhead be lowered?
1.**Test again, and stress test**. You want to discover and fix all the bad things before others hit them.
1.**Consider command line options**. Should it have -p for filtering on a PID? -T for timestamps? -i for interval? See other tools for examples, and copy the style: the usage message should list example usage at the end. Remember to keep the tool doing one thing and doing it well. Also, if there's one option that seems to be the common case, perhaps it should just be the first argument and not need a switch (no -X). A special case of this is *stat tools, like iostat/vmstat/etc, where the convention is [interval [count]].
1.**Concise, intuitive, self-explanatory output**. The default output should meet the common need concisely. Leave much less useful fields and data to be shown with options: -v for verbose, etc. Consider including a startup message that's self-explanatory, eg "Tracing block I/O. Output every 1 seconds. Ctrl-C to end.". Also, try hard to keep the output less than 80 characters wide, especially the default output of the tool. That way, the output not only fits on the smallest reasonable terminal, it also fits well in slide decks, blog posts, articles, and printed material, all of which help education and adoption. Publishers of technical books often have templates they require books to conform to: it may not be an option to shrink or narrow the font to fit your output.
1.**Use pep8 to check Python style**: pep8 --show-source --ignore=E123,E125,E126,E127,E128,E302 filename . Note that it misses some things, like consistent usage, so you'll still need to double check your script.
1.**Write an _example.txt file**. Copy the style in tools/biolatency_example.txt: start with an intro sentence, then have examples, and finish with the USAGE message. Explain everything: the first example should explain what we are seeing, even if this seems obvious. For some people it won't be obvious. Also explain why we are running the tool: what problems it's solving. It can take a long time (hours) to come up with good examples, but it's worth it. These will get copied around (eg, presentations, articles).
1.**Read your example.txt file**. Does this sound too niche or convoluted? Are you spending too much time explaining caveats? These can be hints that perhaps you should fix your tool, or abandon it! Perhaps it better belongs as an /example, and not a tool. I've abandoned many tools at this stage.
