Collecting crash diagnostics from Qt Creator's users

What is a Crash Handler?

When the app is crashing, it is mandatory to collect as a much diagnostic data as possible, crash-stack, environment details, compiler versions, etc ,etc. and analyze these data to mitigate the crash.

The crash-handler does all of that, it attaches to an app and when there is a crash, it will collect all the necessary info, dump it as a file somewhere for processing.

Business rationale

Providing a crash-handling service would help us collect and process diagnostic data from every possible crash of our tools. In this case, being able to collect crash-data from Qt Creator and ergo Qt Quick Designer would help us increase the quality and pro-actively investigate future problems.

Hence, product quality is the immediate outcome of such a service.

What is the effort to implement? Existing solutions?

According to the feedback of Qt Creator team, the Mozilla crash-handler solution, a fully open source one, works really great and has a great reputation in the market.

The project is called Socorro, and it has a client-server architecture; it provides crash-handler client and the server side where the crashes are stored, parsed, analysed.

If you click on the link below, you will see the server side, see how the crashes are reported, how nicely it is to find relevant info:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/home/product/Firefox

Just click on the “Top Crashers” and navigate to see details of the crash. It has great stats also. 

What is needed to get this up and running?

We need someone to setup the Socorro server side and then start integrating the Socorro client in Qt Creator.

The integration with Qt Creator has been done, but the server side/part is missing.

The Socorro project is kind of complete and one needs to simply integrate and test the workflow.

Here you can find more details:

https://socorro.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://github.com/mozilla-services/socorro

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Socorro