Abstract: An extensible licensing system is described that allows modification of the way a product is licensed by third parties after the product has been released. The third party provides a licensing agent that includes a user interface that supplants the user interface for licensing provided by the application. The system invokes the third party licensing agent to obtain licensing information from the user. The system receives licensing information from the licensing agent and allows the application to function using the licensing information. Thus, a third party can create a seamless licensing experience where the user performs licensing steps for one or more applications through the third party's integrated user interface.

Abstract: Various technologies and techniques are disclosed for using historical trends from prior tests to prioritize how failures are reported in later tests. After a user changes a software development project, one or more tests are run to detect failures during execution of the tests. Any detected failures are analyzed in comparison with historical failures for the software development project across tests run for multiple users. Any detected failures are categorized as new or old. New failures are reported with a different emphasis than old failures, such as with new failures being reported as a higher priority than old failures.

Abstract: Computing environments, each executing at least one software program, are monitored for failures occurring during execution of the software program. Information associated with the failure, such as an identification of the software program and a failure type describing the failure, is recorded. The failure information is quantified to report the number of times the software program has failed or the number of times a particular failure has occurred. The quantified data may provide help in prioritizing what program or what failures merit investigation and resolution. Reports may be received from failing computing systems stopped at a state following the occurrence of the failure. In response, hold information is checked to determine whether to instruct the failing computing system to hold a state existing upon the occurrence of the failure.

Abstract: Break and optional hold preserves a state of a computing environment on which a software program has failed. Being able to examine the status of the environment existing upon the occurrence of the failure, including the condition of various processes and values facilitates resolution of the cause of the failure. Upon occurrence of a failure during the execution of a first software program in a first computing environment, execution of the first software program breaks. A first state of the first computing environment existing upon the breaking in execution of the first software program is then held. A failure notification is generated to signal the failure to a monitoring system. The monitoring system accesses hold information to determine whether the first computing environment should hold its current state and whether one or more other computing environments interacting with the first computing environment should also hold their states.

Abstract: A system and method for patching an installed application program and making an installer program aware that an application has been patched is disclosed. The system and method recognizes that a patch has been launched to update the application, the patch including an identifier for the application and information related to a desired change to the application. In response, the installer program accesses a first information store containing information related to a series of functions for installing the application. The installer program also accesses a second information store containing information related to the installed state of the application. Then, the installer program modifies the first information store in accordance with the desired change to the application such that the modified first information store includes additional functions for applying the patch to the application.

Abstract: A method and computer-readable-medium for installing a patch to a computer application program based on the criticality of the patch and the execution format of the computer application are disclosed. An installer program installs application programs. The installer program also-stores related information, including an execution format, in a configuration database. The execution format is either Run-Locally or Run-From-Source. If the execution format is Run-From-Source, the application or features that are designated as Run-From-Source are read-only and are executed from a source, such as from a CD-ROM. Since Run-From-Source executions run from a read-only source, patches cannot be directly applied. When a patch is authored, information as to the criticality of the patch is stored with the patch. Preferably, the criticality is specified based on a feature. When an installer program applies a patch, the installer program queries the execution format. Any features that are Run-Locally can be patched.