[thelist] ASP Error Reporting

[Chris Marsh]

Dear all

I become increasingly frustrated with the lack of ability to accurately
report problems seemingly inherent in anyone who agrees to test sites
for me. An example of a bug report would be something along the lines of
"There is some page in the products section that doesn't work. I went
there once and there was this white page with writing on it"[0].

Rather than bitch and moan about this and having already tried
(abortively) to educate my testers I have decided to automatically
report any errors to myself.

My idea is to produce a COM object (COM rather than .NET because the
only sites I will be using this on are ASP.OLD) that fires off an email
to me full of information every time the page encounters an error. Thus,
all I need to do is let the testers get on with it, and I receive all
the information whenever an error is encountered. This idea only came to
me on the bus this morning, so the reason for the post is to ask:

1) Does a free product already exists that does this?
2) Is this conceptually a good idea?
3) Can anyone see any immediate flaws?
4) Has anyone ever done anything similar?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Regards

Chris Marsh

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"    - William of Ockham

[0]True story.