Error report - should you send it in?

Ever seen this before?

Certainly not as often anymore, but I’ll see it every once in a while.

Do you send the report to SolidWorks? I certainly do. I want the guys at SOLIDWORKS to feel a little sting for my crash! Sometimes I’ll purposefully do the same steps several times so they can see my crash over and over. Revenge is sweet.

SOLIDWORKS does look at the reports. They have a database that collects the reports and they do data mining against this database–looking for areas that may be problematic, spikes in the number of reports, new crash patterns, etc.

Part of the report lists the exact part of code that caused the crash, but this is only the smoking gun. The trick is that oftentimes there are many different ways to get to the same area of a program, that area may work perfectly for 99% of the ways but maybe you found a new combination of steps that cause the crash. If you can recall what you were doing when the crash occurred, no matter how small the detail, be sure to document this in the report.

It may not be your responsibility to debug SOLIDWORKS, but if your report makes SOLIDWORKS better everyone wins.