Applications that have a lot of errors can harm your company’s reputation, especially since customers loose faith in a company that does not quickly fix errors and may even stop buying your products. It is very important to fix errors and eliminate as many errors as possible. Ideally, an application should not include any bugs, but everybody knows this is not reality.

Errors happen, even if you test the application thoroughly, some unexpected situation may occur on the end-user's computer that will cause the application to crash. It would be nice to obtain information about these crashes and fix these errors because if the crash occurred on one computer, it may also happen on another one.

However, this is where the problem lies. When a customer sees an exception’s message box, how will you know they experienced it, if they don't send a message to your support team? Customers have to work on their own tasks and they may be too busy to send you a report about the problem. So, in many cases they tend to continue working with the application without reporting it to you and you may never know about the problem.

Suppose that you receive an error message from a user and you start reproducing the problem using the trial-and-problem procedure. Your goal is to find the sequence of function calls that led to the error, but this process is boring, time-consuming and therefore inefficient. Here lies another problem.

Yet another problem is that it is quite possible that the user’s message will not contain enough information for reproducing and fixing the bug. So, you may need to contact the customer again and again trying to clarify the steps to reproduce and ask about the software and hardware configuration used on their computer. This distracts the customer from their work and makes your company look unprofessional.

AQtrace is an automatic error-reporting system that solves all of these problems:

As you can see, AQtrace provides a solution for all of the described problems. It saves the time and energy needed to add the report generating functionality to your products. AQtrace also includes AQtrace Viewer - a special application that you can use to analyze the received error reports and find the cause of the problem easily.  AQtrace helps developers receive and resolve customers’ problems faster.

Finally, AQtrace also includes a number of plug-ins that add received error reports to issue-tracking systems like AQdevTeam, Visual Studio Team System or Bugzilla. You can easily incorporate it into the bug resolution process adopted in your organization and implement the desired error-reporting and processing policies.

If you have questions about AQtrace, or need further assistance, feel free to write to us at: sales@automatedqa.com or call us in the USA at: (702) 891-9424.