As a software development company, there are few things more frustrating than knowing that your software is crashing and having too little information to do anything about it. That's where you come in, and this time Pep and Jerry deserve a round of applause from the community for helping to track down a pernicious little bug in sending data to some Garmin devices. Find out how you can help in the future.

One of the big features of 1.4 is something that isn't visible to the user usually, but is designed to help ClueTrust monitor the quality of the software. We collect telemetry about what the software is used for and we collect information about crashes, and this is all sent to us when you allow us to send it by clicking OK on our bug report and telemetry question.

At ClueTrust, we look carefully at the information on these reports to try and figure out what kinds of problems people are having and what the most common causes are, so that we can fix them.

There is one big caveat to all of this. In order for us to determine the source of a bug, it either has to be data-independent, really obvious, or we need to have information from you, the LoadMyTracks community. It turns out that, in order to encourage people to send in reports, we collect no information about you, or that could be used to identify you, when you submit the automated bug report. As such, if we have further questions, we can't ask them. Instead, we count on you to submit actual bug reports to go with the telemetry uploads.

Here's how you can help

When LoadMyTracks tells asks you to report a bug by filling out the online form, please do so. That online form serves two purposes: first, it establishes a dialog between you and ClueTrust about the bug; second, it establishes a link between the automated bug report and your actual symptoms. We will most likely ask you for some additional information so that we can figure out how to reproduce the problem. We might even ask you to send us a file, or try out a new version of the software before we make it available to everyone else to make sure that it solves the problem.

Here's what happened

For about a month now, we've been noticing problems with sending data to certain Garmin devices. Unfortunately, try as we might, we haven't been able to cause the problem to happen in-house. Well, it turns out that two concerned members of the community also had the problem, but they reported the bug and in response to some further email, sent us files that we could use to reproduce, and then fix the bug.