After a particularly long night of tracking down bugs in an Alpha version of our previous company's application, it dawned on us that a tool to dynamically instrument Windows so we could better measure what was going on had to exist. It HAD TO exist. And we knew what was needed was not a "script and playback" GUI regression testing tool. We didn't want to record all the things that did work so we could play it back over and over. We wanted to instrument our test systems so we could capture the things that didn't work without having to blast our hands and wrists typing it all out. We wanted a tool that would work like a data acquisition system in controlled environments, so we could create bugs from events that had just occurred. After several days of searching we didn't find a thing. There were some standalone developer-type tools out there that can instrument one composnent (e.g. registry accesses) or another. But we couldn't find anything that pulled it all together and operates so you can easily analyze and share with others.

Because we have a particular background in thunking our way into other address spaces from previous work, we felt we had a pretty good idea of how we could code an application that would do what we needed in a few short nights and weekends. That might not have been completely wise. Weeks turned into months.

It was worth the effort. After all, software is supposed to make people's lives better. Repro definitely qualifies as improving lives. More importantly, it improves the lives of people who in turn are working to improve lives. It's a meta-life improver.