Communications - July 2011

Figure 5. Crashes/day for a firmware bug. Patch was released via Wu on day 10.

Reports as of peak

20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

0%

1

4

7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28

deployments. While WER does not make debugging in the small significantly easier (other than perhaps providing programmers with better analysis of core dumps), WER has enabled a new class of debugging in the large. The statistics collected by WER help us to prioritize valued programmer resources, understand error trends, and find correlated errors.

WER’s progressive data collection strategy means that programmers get the data they need to debug issues, in the large and in the small, while minimizing the cost of data collection to users. Automated error analysis ensures programmers are not distracted with previously diagnosed errors. It also ensures that users are made aware of fixes that can immediately improve their computing experience.

As applied to WER, the law of large numbers says that we will eventually collect sufficient data to diagnose even rare Heisenbugs3; WER has already helped identify such bugs dating back to the original Windows NT kernel.

WER is the first system to provide users with an end-to-end solution for reporting and recovering from errors. WER provides programmers with real-time data about errors actually experienced by users and provides them with an incomparable billion-computer feedback loop to improve software quality.

References

1. Bush, W.r., Pincus, J. D., sielaff, D.J. a static analyzer for finding dynamic programming errors. Softw. Pract. Exp. 30 ( 5) (2000), 775–802.

2. everett, r.r. the Whirlwind I computer. In Proceedings of the 1951 Joint AIEE–IRE Computer Conference (Philadelphia, Pa), 1951.

3. gray, J. Why do computers stop and what can we do about it. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Reliability and Distributed Databases, 1986, 3–12.

Kinshuman Kinshumann, Kirk Glerum, Steve Greenberg, Gabriel Aul, Vince Orgovan, Greg nichols, David Grant, Gretchen Loihle, and Galen hunt Microsoft corporation.

4. lee, I., Iyer, r.k. faults, symptoms, and software fault tolerance in the tandem guarDIan90 operating system. In Digest of Papers of the Twenty- Third International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS- 23). Ieee, toulouse, france, 1993.