Automatic filing of a task for application crashes

• US 9,886,336 B2
• Filed: 10/28/2015
• Issued: 02/06/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 10/28/2015
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Meta Platforms, Inc. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Meta Platforms, Inc. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.)
• Inventors: Bajaj, Manish
• Primary Examiner(s): Wilson, Yolanda L
• Application Number:
  US14/925,801
• Publication Number:
  US 20170123887A1
• Time in Patent Office: 832 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0742 in a data processing system embedded in a mobile device, e.g. mobile phones, handheld devices
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0748 in a remote unit communicating with a single-box computer node experiencing an error/fault remote testing G06F11/2294
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0754 by exceeding limits
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0778 Dumping, i.e. gathering error/state information after a fault for later diagnosis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0781 Error filtering or prioritizing based on a policy defined by the user or on a policy defined by a hardware/software module, e.g. according to a severity level
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0793 Remedial or corrective actions recovery from an exception in an instruction pipeline G06F9/3861; by retry G06F11/1402; for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity H04L69/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/30 Monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3438 monitoring of user actions tracking the activity of the user H04L67/535
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3466 Performance evaluation by tracing or monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/81 Threshold

Abstract

The disclosure is directed to a crash bot that automates filing of a task for crashes in an application, e.g., a mobile app of a social networking application. The crash bot identifies various instances of crashes, e.g., a failure, of an application, identifies a root cause of the crash, generates a task with various details about the crash that may be helpful for an entity, e.g., a programmer, identifies the entity to who the task is to be assigned, and assigns the task to the identified entity automatically. The crash bot can minimize the time consumed in assigning the crashes to an entity who can resolve the crashes. The crash bot can achieve this goal by identifying crashes as soon as they occur, creating a task for the identified crashes and assigning the task to the appropriate user automatically.

Claims

1. A method performed by a computing system, comprising:

retrieving, by the computing system and from a first data source, multiple crash reports of an application, wherein a specified crash report of the multiple crash reports includes information regarding an error that caused the application to crash, wherein different crash reports are generated for crashes caused by different errors;

obtaining, by the computing system and from a second data source, a metric associated with the crash, the metric quantifying an impact of the crash;

determining if the metric exceeds a specified threshold; and

responsive to a determination that the metric exceeds the specified threshold, generating a task having information regarding the crash, the information obtained from the specified crash report.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

assigning the task to a user to resolve the error that caused the crash.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein assigning the task to the user includes:

identifying, using the specified crash report, a component of the application at which the error that caused the crash is originating from, and

determining a specified user who last accessed the component as the user.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein assigning the task to the user includes sending the task to a specified user for forwarding to the user associated with a component of the application at which the error that caused the crash is originating from.

5. The method of claim 2 further comprising:

sending a notification to the user, the notification requesting the user to provide a status regarding resolving the error.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein generating the task includes:

retrieving, from the first data source, the crash reports for each of multiple versions of the application,

identifying, using the crash reports, crashes in each of the versions of the application that are caused by the error, and

merging the information regarding the crashes into the task in an event the metric associated with the crashes exceed the specified threshold.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein generating the task includes generating the task in an event a number of crash reports generated for the crashes caused by the error exceeds a specified threshold.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein generating the task includes:

generating, in the task, a link to a crash report that includes information regarding the error that caused the crash, a metric associated with the crash, a number of crash reports generated for the error, a type of device on which the crash occurred and an operating system of the device.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the impact of the crash is determined as a function of a number of active users of the application and a number of those users affected by the crash.

10. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

associating the task with a tag that describes a characteristic of the task.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the associating the task with a tag further includes associating the task with a “

launch blocker”

tag, the “

launch blocker”

tag indicating that the error which caused the crash indicated by the task has a potential to prevent the application from being made available for end-users of the application.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein retrieving the crash reports includes retrieving the crash reports that are generated in a specified duration.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein retrieving the crash reports includes retrieving the crash reports for crashes by a specified error that is occurring a first version of the application but not in a second version of the application.

14. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer-readable instructions, comprising:

instructions for retrieving, from a first data source, multiple crash reports of an application indicating multiple instances of crashes of the application, wherein a specified crash report of the multiple crash reports includes information regarding an error that caused the application to crash at a client device;

instructions for identifying a set of the crash reports generated for crashes caused by a specified error;

instructions for confirming that a number of crash reports in the set of the crash reports exceed a first specified threshold;

instructions for obtaining, from a second data source, a metric associated with crashes by the specified error, the metric quantifying an impact of the crashes by the specified error;

instructions for confirming that the metric exceeds a second specified threshold; and

instructions for assigning a task having information regarding the crashes by the specified error to a user for resolution of the specified error.

15. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the instructions for assigning the task include:

instructions for identifying a collection of crash reports generated for multiple versions of the application, the collection of crash reports generated for crashes of the application by an occurrence of the specified error in the different versions of the application, and

instructions for generating a single task for all the crashes across the different versions of the application.

16. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14 further comprising:

instructions for identifying a launch group of the application for which a first subset of the set of crash reports are generated, the launch group of the application being a specified version of the application made available to a subset of end-users of the application, the first subset of the crash reports indicating a crash of the specified version of the application in client devices of at least some of the subset of end-users.

17. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 16 further comprising:

instructions for determining whether a metric associated with the crash of the specified version of the application exceeds a third specified threshold, and

instructions for notifying the user regarding the launch group of the application.

18. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the impact of the crash includes is determined as a function of a number of active users of the application and a number of those users affected by the crash.

19. A system, comprising:

a processor;

a report retrieving module configured to retrieve, from a first data source, multiple crash reports of an application, wherein a specified crash report of the multiple crash reports includes information regarding an error that caused the application to crash, wherein different crash reports are generated for crashes caused by different errors;

a metric retrieving module configured to obtain, from a second data source, a metric associated with the crash, the metric quantifying an impact of the crash, wherein the second module is further configured to determine if the metric exceeds a specified threshold; and

a task manager module configured to, responsive to a determination that the metric exceeds the specified threshold, generate a task for the crash, the task including information regarding the crash from the specified crash report.

20. The system of claim 19 further comprising:

a user identification module to identify a user to who the task is to be sent for resolution of the error that caused the crash, the fourth module configured to determine a specified user who last accessed a component of the application at which the error originated as the user.