Crash Signatures

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to organize and manage the stacks of crash reports that will be piling up in this thing.

As a result, I've made some changes to the way that Crash Reoprts get grouped together. Now you can define "Signatures" that specify patterns for things such as URL, POST data, Headers, etc. and use them to group Crashes together. You could sort of do this before, but it caused a few problems that I won't get in to here 'cause, hey, the thing doesn't work that way anymore.

This idea gave rise to a sort of Navigator panel in the interface that you can use to drill down into your crash history by Signature, Category, Batch, and Status. It makes it a lot easier to dig down and re-run, say, "everything that's still crashing the site when the user monkeys with the querystring by hand."

So that's Today's plan: Finish up the scripts to Migrate any existing data to the new shema and get the GUI up and working again. And get a first crack at that new Navigator pane in place.

Anyway, progress continues apace. We've even put a new version of the Regressor.NET Public Site life a few days ago, based on CMSCommon, a little plug-in Content Management System we've been developing for a while now. There's a little proto-knowledge base up there that will get you up and running using the thing as a beta tester, and some general info so that people can hopefully figure out what Regressor.NET actually does.

Screenshots to come soon!

Distraction

Well, I didn't make it.

I had planned to get something out the door and into Beta before I left for England in December, but it just didn't happen. I kept getting sucked into Blogabond features, and before I knew it I was stepping onto a plane.

There is actually a lot more involved in shipping this thing than I had originally thought. I still need to build a few sample ASP.NET websites that show Regressor.NET implemented in various ways. I need to get the documentation to the point where a smart person can actually install and use the thing. And I need to polish the installer to the point where nobody will need to read that documentation just to get their site up and running.

Got a kick in the pants last night from an excellent interview with Joel Spolsky, and re-committed myself to finishing this thing. So now Regressor has a few new features, and I have some real time built into my schedule every week to devote solely to this project.

Hopefully, we won't see another post like this one in the future...

Regressor.net - Automated Regression Testing for ASP.NET

So, now that Regressor.net is up and running, it's probably time to prove the technology a bit. I'll spend the better part of today playing around with ways to serialize and deserialize HTTP Requests, and run them against a real-world ASP.NET website.

More to come.

Jason Kester
Expat Software Consulting Services