New Error Reporting in ArcGIS 9.3

One of the new capabilities in ArcGIS 9.3 is the ability to send error reports to ESRI any time that ArcGIS fails. We thought we’d try to explain our reasons for adding this capability to our software and what it can do to help us build more stable, robust software for you.

We know that software crashes are one of the most important quality issues that you face in using ArcGIS.  Our goal is to eliminate situations where an ArcGIS application crashes.

These types of errors occur in many situations -- for example, when the software is used for very long periods of time and a memory leak has occurred which consumes the available system resources, when a hardware limitation is reached, when ArcGIS is used with some third party software extensions that have not yet been updated to work with your version of ArcGIS.

In your work, these errors can be disruptive and extremely frustrating. Here at ESRI, it is also very frustrating.  We find that many of these errors cannot be easily reproduced. In addition, many of the software errors that cause crashes are almost impossible for us to discover and eliminate through software testing.

We think that error reporting can result in significant improvements in our support to you. To help us with this effort, at 9.3 all the ArcGIS Desktop applications as well as ArcGIS Explorer have an error reporting mechanism that automatically captures information any time that you experience a software crash. These error reports will enable us to investigate and fix many of these issues.

This short video provides a nice overview on how we investigate and act on all crash reports. It was shown at this year’s User Conference in San Diego. This provides a peek into what we do to review, evaluate, and act on the error reports that you send to us.

While ArcGIS crashes can be extremely frustrating, we want to encourage you to send us your error reports. Every time we can find and fix errors that you reported, it means that we can prevent the problem from re-occurring somewhere else in our user community.

One example panel from our internal Crash Report website showing a report of the top 5 issues that were reported most frequently by users over a given time frame  (e.g., within the past week or month). These statistics help us to understand frequency of occurrence for all issues and help us to understand and prioritize our responses.

A help topic on error reporting is available for ArcGIS Desktop that provides more details about submitting your error reports to us.