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Testers have a different perspective on movies

  • Artigo

 

Gary came by the other day and we talked a little about the mentality of testers.  He had watched a movie over the weekend and asked his wife about some of the details about what was going on in the background during some of the scenes.  Apparently, he had been paying about as much attention to the background as the main characters, and was wondering if he was the only one who noticed such things.  It led to a minor disconnect in his house - he had a significantly different experience after seeing the exact same movie as others.  I have a couple of examples as well.

 

First, any film by John Hughes.  He always pays attention to the details in the background, with the most famous being the custom license plates most of his cars have.  I watch these movies over and over and his attention to the little details always impresses.  And they are great stories, too.

 

Second, there is a video at https://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/dailytelegraph.html which challenges you to count some actions in a basketball game.  I think most successful testers can complete this experiment - I did.  Oh, and you have to have Java installed to see the video (third link down).

 

If you compare this to testing software, the mentality is the same.  We are tasked with finding the big errors before we ship (OneNote won't start, corrupts my data, etc…) and are also on the hook for tiny errors as well, such as "the third sentence in this dialog does not end with a period and it should".  We need to identify and track all these errors.

 

Part of the key to completing this task is a mantra I was taught long ago: "The proper place for bugs is in Product Studio."  When testing any feature in OneNote, for example, napkin math, it is possible to stumble across anything.  When a tester notices an error with any area of the product, she stops and enters the bug before continuing to the area she was planning to test.  So if she is trying to verify some payment functionality but notices the colors do not appear correctly, she stops her planned testing to investigate the coloring problem.  This will eventually lead to finding a bug report in our database which is being used to track the coloring errors she noticed.  There may be an existing bug already that someone else reported or she may need to enter a new one.  Either way, we wind up with an actionable report which will need to be resolved.  The next step, once the coloring problem has been logged, is to get back on track with the napkin math testing. 

 

I know this is kind of a short note today.  Our intern, Anirudh Saraf, starts this week and I'm getting the final preparation completed for his arrival.

 

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

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