How to remotely debug customer issues with a website

Question

Just recently put a new site live to be internet facing. The site is built on ASP.NET MVC, and JQuery primarily. We tested the site fairly rigorously in IE6/7/8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. We do capture exceptions and log them.

We've just received a couple complaints where the user is unable to register on the site. There are no exceptions thrown from the .NET layer, just apparently the "register" button doesn't work.

What is the best practices to debug an issue like this? Is there a good way to remotely log client side events? Are we at the point where we need to contact this user and use webex or copilot or similar to see what is happening?

Answer 1

Ask user what OS/Browser/Firewall/Anything else that you think might be relevant he is using and try to reproduce the bug on developer's computer.

The best way to debug an user issue is to reproduce it on development computer.

Answer 2

Probably the quickest thing is to do some sort of remote session with the user's machine. There are all kinds of weird configuration quirks that could be present on their machine that you'd never catch otherwise.

Answer 3

If you see no errors on the server then the issue is client-side. If the user is unable to relate any more information then that the button is not working then you will most likely be wasting your time trying to troubleshoot this problem over email. I would initiate a remote session with them (using your tool of choice) so you can see their browser and actually be able to debug the issue in person.

What you will probably find is that the browser has javascript disabled or something of that nature.

Answer 4

These types of issues have to be reproed, which is a royal pain in the rear. In the next version of Team System, which will not help you here, there is a tool that can record errors for repro, but I do not expect it out until later this year at the earliest.

If this is a client side issue, you will not be able to find any errors with your instrumentation, so there is not much you can do server side. Most likely there is a JavaScript error being thrown and captured by the browser. The user may not even see it, so they may not even know what to tell you to help fix it.

You can instrument JavaScript, to an extent, but it can be overkill.

Answer 5

I guess that login button is the first button the user can click.

You probably bind the onclick event using jquery, so the user will have javascript disabled.