How to have all keystrokes recorded during development phase in the tested application?

Question

While reading an article about the bite-project the idea came to my head that it would be great to have something like bite running outside the browser. I am testing a C++-Windows application using TestComplete. While developing I navigate inside this application also without TestComplete. Sometimes I run into a crash that is not easy to reproduce. Since I usually do not expect this crash there I did not pay attention to what I did which makes it hard to reproduce.

It is said, that bite-project records and playbacks all the keystrokes made. Is there something similar also for non-browser-applications. Maybe not TestComplete itself since I need this for developing (writing JScript).

Answer 1

If you are using Windows 7, the Problem Step Recorder might be useful.

Answer 2

There is another way to do this and that is to 'record' what you are doing with somethig that takes a 'video' of what you are doing on the desktop then you can see exactly what was clicked, typed and where the mouse was at the time of the crash and it will capture any small dialogs that are popped up and closed before you can read them. If you leave task manager open at the same time on a different screen/ part of the screen then this also can show potential leaks, memory hogs or processor hogs without having to gather those metrics seperatly.

If this runs too slowly on one machine then I think you can do the screen grab from another machine looking into your machine using remote desktop.