Windows Error Reporting Tracks Down Bugs

Microsoft is encouraging customers to make more use of its Windows Error Reporting system, which can improve the quality of Windows. Windows Error Reporting captures information about crashing software, uploads the information to Microsoft so that a developer can create and test a fix, and then makes the fix available to customers via Windows Update. But users may be reluctant to report errors, and developers must digitally sign their software and call an error-reporting API to ensure the correct information about software failures is captured for analysis.

Microsoft, Developers, and Users Benefit

Microsoft built the Windows Error Reporting (WER) feedback system into Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to capture information about failing OS components, drivers, and applications and to make it easier to fix problems systematically.

WER collects detailed information about a failure to help developers determine what caused it. The number of reports received by Microsoft also provides data about the relative frequency of a particular failure, allowing the failures that affect the most users to get the highest priority. As might be expected, failure frequencies are not evenly distributed across the various bugs in a product, and statistics show that 80% of failures are due to 20% of the reported bugs. In his keynote address at 2003 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chief software architect, cited the example of a firewall driver that was causing up to 80,000 crashes per month. Using WER, Microsoft and the driver developer were able to identify the problem, create a fix, and propagate the fix widely, reducing the number of reported crashes from this driver to almost zero.