Microsoft error reporting drives bug fixing effort
ENT News | at | by Mike
Microsoft is prioritizing its bug fixing efforts based on the pop-up error report windows that appear during setup and application crashes in newer versions of Windows and Office, according to a letter Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent to customers Wednesday evening. The technology was developed by a small team in the Office group and is formally called Microsoft Error Reporting. Microsoft says it keeps the information anonymous and confidential in a secure database that will not be used to identify users or for marketing purposes.
The error reporting feature allowed Microsoft to address 29 percent of errors involving the operating system and Microsoft and third-party applications running on it in Windows XP Service Pack 1, which shipped last month. Error reporting helped Microsoft identify and eliminate more than half of all Office XP errors with Office XP Service Pack 2, according to Ballmer's letter.