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Guide

Best practices

TraceMind rewards discipline. These habits keep investigations fast, Reports readable, and conclusions defensible on solo projects and in teams.

Scenarios

Name after systems, not tickets alone

Inventory Sync survives longer than JIRA-4821. Put ticket IDs in MindBoard notes or Report exports.

One Scenario per bug family

Reuse and duplicate playbooks instead of starting from zero each time.

Pin and favorite proven setups

Weekly investigations should be one click away from the Scenarios list.

Validate before long reproductions

Fix blockers while setup is cheap: recording requires Tracking, Watches, or enabled Probes.

Tracking

  • Start with the owning type of the broken state, not the entire assembly.
  • Add caller types only when Causal Flow or Exception Flow shows a gap.
  • Use Track Public Only on large types before Track Everything.
  • Treat Track Everything as a diagnostic pass, then trim on the next take.

Watches

  • One excellent Watch on the symptom member beats five vague ones.
  • Prefer properties over fields when both exist: fields may be Unsupported in V1.
  • Use This Instance for scene-object bugs; This Type when any instance matters.
  • Raise Profile or Watch depth in Preferences only when values look shallow after a fair first take.

Probes

  • Enable only categories the bug can touch: Scene for load order, Destroy for lifetime, Coroutine for IEnumerator races, etc.
  • Do not enable Physics expecting lane data (unsupported for capture today).
  • Combine probes with one Watch anchor so you can align environment events to a value transition.

Recording

  • Write the question before Start Recording.
  • One clean path: minimal side quests, stop immediately after the symptom.
  • Shorter beats longer: you read everything you capture.
  • Prefer Standard Profile; move to Deep when evidence is incomplete, not preemptively.

Reading Reports

  • Timeline Overview first to find when; Tree for where; specialized surfaces for why.
  • Do not open every panel out of habit. Daily Workflow maps questions to surfaces.
  • Use Search scopes… when you know a symbol or scope name.
  • Export when the audience is outside Unity; MindBoard when the audience is future you.

High-frequency activity

When methods fire very often:

  • Review high-frequency capture mode in Preferences (representation grouping vs raw detail).
  • Narrow Tracking to the hot path's boundary types.
  • Use Flow filters such as Hide Tiny before concluding the graph is unusable.

MindBoard

  • One theme per board: Boss Phase 2 Desync, not Everything Q3.
  • Use Reference nodes for evidence, Note nodes for reasoning.
  • Relationships are your assertions (Caused By, Supports, Contradicts), not automatic truth.
  • Apply templates (Bug, Performance, Crash) to avoid blank-board paralysis.
  • Set board status to Resolved or Archived when done: open loops erode trust.

Team handover

  1. Scenario name + last good Report
  2. MindBoard with hypothesis and links
  3. HTML or Markdown export for issue trackers
  4. One sentence: "The write at T was caused by …"

Workflows Core Concepts Limitations