Good Error Reporting

One thing most developers hate is dealing with users' error reports. It's not that the users are evil, it just happens that no one has a good solution for communicating what are the results of an error or the conditions that lead up to one.

This is a subclass of the larger problem of communicating software concepts. It's not too dissimilar to the problem of conveying a feature request, walking through a use case, or an experiment proposal. But for now, I'll just stay with the question of error reports.

It seems to me that what might be lacking is the visual component to an explanation. Whenever I have to solve someone else's software problem, I need to see what went wrong. But, this is not convenient when the user is not in the same room. As I'm getting ready to send some simulations that require some setup to a lab on the other side of the Atlantic, I've come to realise that I need a solution to this. I think there may be two practical solutions that could work well on top of the usual collection of core and log files.

Use a remote assistance application. This is fine if you have a lot of bandwidth and are in similar time zones, and you actually know how to use one of these applications. Time coordination and expertise are required.

Use a screen capture program and create a movie of the problem. This has the advantage of being simple to do and it provides a record of the incident for future reference. Given that there are few fairly easy to use screen capture applications (such as Camtasia), this makes for a strategy that should be easy enough for a client or colleague to implement.

Personally, I think video is an underused communication tool. Video is getting easier to handle, be it as real time conferencing, capturing incidents or presentations. It is a communication and collaboration technique that merits further exploration.