Automating Software Failure Reporting

Abstract

There are many ways to measure quality before and after software is released. For commercial and internal-use-only products, the most important measurement is the user’s perception of product quality. Unfortunately, perception is difficult to measure, so companies attempt to quantify it through customer satisfaction surveys and failure/behavioral data collected from its customer base. This article focuses on the problems of capturing failure data from customer sites. To explore the pertinent issues I rely on experience gained from collecting failure data from Windows XP systems, but the problems you are likely to face when developing internal (noncommercial) software should not be dissimilar.