A computer program file or a sequence of processing steps from an authoring environment of a data processing system is used to generate a graph including nodes representing the processing steps is generated. Unique identifiers (tags) are assigned to the nodes. One or more processing steps are optionally modified while preserving the original identifiers. If an error occurs during execution, error information is saved including the processing step that failed and data records that triggered the failure. The identifier of the failed processing step is attached to the error information. The error information is collected and processed. The collected error information is used to correlate the error to the failed processing step and to data records triggering the error using the identifier of the failed processing step recorded with the error information. The correlated error information indicates cause and location of the error.