Debugging Home Run – Problem Step Recorder in Windows 7

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I just got an email about a really cool new tool built into Windows 7 that Microsoft used to debug their new platform. It is called Problem Step Recorder. The best thing to do is to post a snippet of the email right here. I think it says everything perfectly:

“In case you’re not aware of this, here is a little known Microsoft tool bundled with Windows 7 that can be extremely useful to illustrate a problem when testing an application. The diagnostic tool called “Problem Step Recorder” was originally produced by Microsoft during the development of Windows 7 Beta to assist their Quality Assurance team in debugging the OS. It uses a combination of screen captures with mouse tracking to record your actions and can be a great way of describing a problem to others. The program is launched from the Start menu by typing ‘psr’ or ‘psr.exe’ in the search field. You’ll get a floating applet that looks like this: When you hit the Record button, the applet tracks your mouse and keyboard input while taking screenshots that correspond to each new action. When you stop recording your session is saved to an HTML slide show that recreates your steps. It also allows you to add comments to further document the problem. I think it can be very useful as an attachment in [your bug tracking tool] for those hard to describe issues or as a “How To” document for end users.”

Which leads to other ways of doing this… you could youse WebEx or Windows Media Encoder to document any bug as a step-by-step. If you use WatiN, Selenium, or VS2010, you can also use their recorders to document any bugs you may find in a web application, hand that to the dev team, and then there is no guessing how to reproduce the bug.

Kudos to Microsoft, and to the folks who uncovered this!