As I come close to my fifth anniversary working on WER Services it is a good time to reflect on where we aspire to be. Our team vision is best described as:

"Software development organizations everywhere use WER Services to make business decisions and improve their product quality and customer experience"

The way I think about it is by comparing the experience of Windows development and Web development. When a Web application crashes, it is relatively easy to look at logs and trace information and understand the problem, it is then trivial to deploy a fix to the problem.  

Well, our goal is to make this functionality available for Windows developers (starting with Windows XP and improving along the way).

Utilizing WER Services should allow Windows developers to:

• Listen - find out about your customer's problems through several feedback channels (such as user mode and kernel mode crashes and verbose feedback)
• Learn - prioritize issues through reporting (available on the WinQual site). Collect rich contextual data for specific problems (such as memory dumps, log files and WMI queries).
• Respond - create WER Responses to push fixes to your customers and to ask them for more information when needed

Through this ever improving feedback process developers and product managers can see tangible benefits to software reliability. Improved reliability will:

• Improve your customer satisfaction
• Reduce your support cost

I would argue most of the pieces to achieve this vision are already here, I will discuss them in the next post.

Nir Mashkowski

Lead Program Manager, WER Services