Field Medic is the main diagnostic application produced by Microsoft for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile. This tool allows us to easily collect the information about a device and logs from your device. This article analyzes the Field Medic application and its usage in testing.
Introduction
Software testing is an important stage of application development which needs much time and money to solve different tasks. Logging is quite an important process of testing, the task of which is to localize the errors in the process of working with different software products.
Installation of Field Medic
There are two ways to install the Field Medic application:
- Download it from a store using the following link on the device: download the Field Medic application;
- Pre-load the application. The application is included in Mobile OS packages (in the “Field Medic” folder) with a license and offers HTML for partners who want to pre-load the application.
The Main Capabilities
Field Medic is the application which can be used to capture event logs of applications and also separate units of Windows device (ETW – Event Tracing for Windows) for the selected information categories. Field Medic saves files of ETW log and general information in a folder accessible via USB Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). MTP is enabled by default on all popular devices. This allows you to extract output files such as Field Medic reports easily and not using TShell or other testing tools.
System requirements:
* Windows 10 Mobile, Windows Phone 8.1
* ARM architecture
How the workflow looks like
After you installed and ran the application, you will see quite an easy interface. The application does not need any additional settings to start capturing the logs; you just need to click on the “Start logging” button.
To stop capturing, you need to click on the “Stop Logging” button which will be displayed instead of the “Start Logging” button.
After you stop capturing the logs, the application will show a window to edit a title, steps to reproduce and attach the screenshots.
After filling the fields, you need to click on the “Save” button which is made in the form of the diskette.
To view the name and edit the saved log, you need to click on the “View Reports” button:
The last saved log will be displayed at the top of the list and also its title will include the date and time of log capturing, which makes its search easier and also helps the developers to localize the bug and compare the device’s logs with the server’s logs in case they use the client-server application:
Logs uploading is very easy. For this, you need to connect a mobile phone to a computer and then go to the following path: This PC\Windows phone\Phone\Documents\FieldMedic\reports
You will see the folders with the saved logs, captured applications which can be sent to a developer.
We want to add that Field Medic collects logs not only from the active application but also captures everything happening in all modules of the device.
You can also choose and configure from what units of the device the application will collect the logs:
Also, after clicking on the “Device status” button, you can view the device information:
You can open the settings by clicking on the “Advanced” button:
You can choose from the menu all necessary settings for log capturing including modules from which you need to extract the logs.
Comparing Field Medic with Competition
Visual Studio can be an alternative to Field Medic. Visual Studio is a desktop application, it also takes much space on a hard drive and is hard to use. Visual Studio is more appropriate for developers since it has many different add-ons for development. Its advantage is that after project launches you can view a log in real time and even a filter if you need to search for a particular log.
Personal Impression
After analyzing all information mentioned above, I think that Field Medic is rather easy to use, does not need any additional programs, settings and other software which allows it to stay competitive in its field. The application is easily installed from the Windows store and is ready to use after its installation.
Summary
Field Medic is quite easy to install and to use for capturing the logs of a Windows Phone device in real-time mode. The application has a quite wide range of settings in the sense of choosing the modules of the device from which you need to capture logs in a real-time mode which allows us to localize the time, place and reason of the bug and makes it quite useful in software testing services.