Rookout has released the first tool to collaboratively debug code on demand, including in production. Rookout’s Workspaces feature works like “Google Docs” for debugging live code, letting developers safely share an IDE tracking down issues and collecting data together.
Inside a Rookout Workspace, a developer can set ‘non-breaking breakpoints’ in the live code, without any restarts, redeploys or having to write any new code. The data collected from the ‘breakpoint’ is shared with any other team member who shares the Workspace. Team members can safely create their own ‘non-breaking breakpoints’ into the Workspace and debug together on the server without any screen-sharing or giving access to a local machine. developers can also define separate workspaces if they want to work independently on the same code without getting in each other’s way.
Rookout Workspaces also let developers define a specific section of their environments for data collection. A Workspace can be set to target ‘production’ or ‘staging’, a specific client, a single process or a single IP address. Rookout only collects data from inside the defined Workspace, cutting down on wasteful collection and filtering.
Academic research shows “Pair debugging”, where two or more people work together to find issues in code, is a strong tool for finding challenging bugs. However, traditional debuggers run on a solitary user’s local environment and have very limited, if any, collaboration capabilities.
Rookout Workspaces makes deep cross-company collaboration possible. For example, customer support team members can work directly with developers in a Workspace to solve a live customer issue, or data analysts and product teams could use a Workspace to optimize the code together.
“As a developer, every issue you’re trying to handle resides within a specific ‘space’,” said Rookout co-founder and CTO Liran Haimovitch. “The ability to tag, segment, include and exclude parts of your environment is crucial in a world of data overload, giving you just the data you need exactly when you need it, and letting you share it with anyone else who needs it too.”
“Rookout’s Workspaces is built for a world where distributed software teams have to debug distributed systems,” said Or Weis, Rookout co-founder and CEO. “Distributed, collaborative debugging is quickly becoming a must with modern software. Workspaces let developers focus only on the environments they want based on their own business logic, and helps different parts of a company work together to safely and quickly resolve bugs.”