Measuring defects

I was working on performance tuning for the mobile client of RemoteX Applications when I found a tool called EQATEC Analytics. Six month later I added it to our clients for the first time.

EQATEC Analytics is quite interesting, for RemoteX it solves an interesting issue. Error reports are hard to collect from Compact Framework devices, especially since all error messages state that “we’re missing the translation pack to translate these errors, thus you get this crappy errors message instead”.

EQATEC Analytics captures all unhandled exceptions and report them back to a server application for analysis. This means that all crashes are reported so they can be analyzed by us, without involving the user in the information collection process. (no personal information is sent to the server)

The benefits of this enormous. We can see the quality trends of our applications (at least when it comes to crashes), and fix the errors that occur the most.

Traditionally the errors are fixed based on the information received by customers, manual error reports and what not. Relying on this type of information means that you fix the errors that most people report, or the errors you can reproduce. With EQATEC Analytics you, you can get an exact stack trace indicating the problem area, and depending on how you configure it to work you can also request information regarding what was happening during the crash.,

It also provides an excellent way to see if our efforts of improving the quality of the product is helping or not.

Now it also has features to collect information about what kind of system our applications are run on, and also collect statistics of which features are used in the applications.

We’ve used EQATEC Analytics in production since January 2010 and so far we are very happy with the results.

*An interesting note here is that the next version of Shuffle will use a similar tool for Android, called Flurry. *