Monday, July 28, 2008

Kudos for NetBeans exception reporting

I've personally been impressed by the way NetBeans handles reporting an exception for you (and I personally have had a number of bug reports come to me this way, which I don't think I would have otherwise been informed of). It really does help improve the quality of the product.

But here is one user who I think describes the quality of this feature quite well:

So I used the Mercurial support in NetBeans 6.1 (as I have been for some
time), and something went wrong. NetBeans 6.1 did not crash, but recovered and saved the java exception for me, I viewed the exception stacktrace and it was obvious it was a crash inside the NetBeans 6.1 Mercurial support code. There was an option of reporting the crash so I hit the "Report" button to report the problem, then continued on with my work.

Then a few minutes later, I noticed that I had a Firefox tab open to a netbeans site... It said:


Upload of NetBeans Error Report Complete
Thank you very much for sending error information to our server.

After cross-checking your report against others recently received,
your report has been classified as a duplicate of report #64798.
Your comment and logging information were added to this one.

If you believe this issue is severe and you are registered with
netbeans.org, you can use the above link to check all the generated
information in our web application, and you can enter this issue
directly into Issuezilla. To see all reported issues, visit the
Exceptions page.

Thanks again for your help.

The NetBeans development team!


It automatically detected a matching java exception in a previously filed bug report, detecting the duplicate bug report.

So NetBeans 6 did everything right as far as I'm concerned:

1. The tool did not crash or stop or even have to restart due to the error
2. It allowed me the option of reporting the problem
3. It made it trivial to report the problem
4. It automatically submitted the report and data seemlessly and easily
5. It detected it was a duplicate and let me know it was.

Good work guys.

No comments: