Automated Error Reporting: A gateway to higher software quality

Ignorance is bliss, but it does not apply when dealing with software bugs.

Software quality experts will tell us that companies that work to identify bugs and improve software quality can get more trust from customers, get higher profits, lower development and maintenance costs, streamline delivery processes, and avoid customer churn.

Software quality is a big project

If you think software quality is not a big deal, take a look at Capers Jones's article in the June 2011 issue of Software Quality magazine, sponsored by the American Quality Association:

The release cycle of high quality software is 15% shorter than that of low quality software.

The total cost of high-quality software from the first release to the five-year cycle is 30% lower than the low quality software.

High-quality software is 40% less expensive to maintain per year than low quality software.

The larger the size of the software, the more important the quality is.

According to Jones, software testing is less than 35% effective when it comes to finding bugs.

Considering the impact of software quality on the company's business, the development team is looking for new ways to improve the quality of the software. One of the most promising approaches is automated error Reporting (automated error Reporting), which is based on the user to determine software errors and exceptions.

Our goal is to make error reporting easy to use, complete, and customizable

There are a number of ways to involve users in software error correction, such as mail and forum communities, custom software features, Windows Error Reporting (WER), and out-of-the-box solutions.

However, these methods are not necessarily more effective than automatic error reporting: Some methods will allow users to take on too much responsibility, some methods can not collect accurate information, some methods can not capture the key features, such as variable run-time assignment may be a key feature, some methods can not submit errors to the common error tracking system.

Our goal is to make error reporting easy to use, complete, and customizable, which requires users to easily submit error reports, and developers can easily understand error reporting. This is not a simple matter, and each error report should include complete stack trace information and contextual information to help find and fix bugs. Automatic error reporting should also be integrated with the bug tracking tool.

"Automated error reporting makes it easy for users to submit error reports," says Andrew Neville. As soon as the user presses the Send key, we can receive all the information needed to fix the error. After using the automated error reporting, we make it easier for users to communicate with us. Andrew Neville, a senior software engineer at Neville&rowe, used automated error Reporting in the smartassembly of Red Gate, enabling business Intelligence analytics software Impactedge to track bugs well.

Understanding Automated Error Reporting

The value of automating error reporting is to let the development team understand the details of unknown exceptions. It brings benefits for software development from five aspects:

It provides users with an effective feedback channel, which increases the communication efficiency between the user and the development team.

It lets the development team know which bugs are most likely to occur, and allows the development team to fix bugs based on factual circumstances rather than guesswork.

It allows the development team to fix bugs faster.

It can confirm and fix bugs at a lower cost.

It allows the development team to get more upfront user feedback before releasing the software. If the development team is using agile development, automated error Reporting allows the development team to quickly develop an iterative plan based on user feedback, thereby shortening the iteration cycle.

"Knowing how often an exception happens is very helpful for fixing an exception," explains Ed Blankenship, a Microsoft MVP and it advisor. Knowing the details of a bug is essential for fixing bugs. “

How Automated Error Reporting works

An ideal automated error Reporting system allows users to easily tell the development team what the problem is with the SOFTWARE PRODUCT. Ideally, when the software is abnormal, the user should be able to get a simple and straightforward error message and can send the error report through the user interface. This can greatly save the time users spend on describing and feedback errors. All the necessary information should be collected automatically, without the need for users to worry about it.