2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the tree further comprises remedies, each remedy comprising a procedure for solving one of the problems, at least one of the rules comprising a specific navigation of decision factors of the tree ending in a remedy.
1. A method of encoding a diagnostic troubleshooting procedure for detecting problems in a deployment of a software application, comprising: providing a human-readable diagnostic procedure configured to be used to detect problems in the deployment, the diagnostic procedure represented as a machine-readable tree comprising decision factors, at least some of the decision factors having “yes” and “no” paths; encoding the decision factors into a machine-readable format, including encoding input and output information for each encoded decision factor; using a computer-implemented tool to automatically convert the tree into a plurality of machine-readable rules, each of the rules corresponding to one of the problems, each of the rules comprising a specific navigation of a plurality of the decision factors and a plurality of “yes” or “no” paths of the tree, each of said navigations comprising a navigation from a root node of the tree to one of a plurality of terminal nodes of the tree; and storing the rules in computer storage, in a format in which the rules can be used by a computer to automatically detect said problems in the deployment of the software application.