Anutthara's Favorite Bug

There was this bug that I remember even 4 years later now. Since we expect our users to install our product on operating systems of different languages, we do globalization testing on this. So for the Beta release, I installed our product on a Japanese (JPN) Windows 2003 (W2K3) box and tested that the basic functionality was all doing good. Of course, it already worked well on an English W2K3 system - so we were quite happy with the way it went.

Late into the cycle, just for kicks, I installed my product on a German machine and tried to kick off a build. Boom! Crash on just kicking off a build! It was my first product shipping experience - I totally panicked on finding this so late. :) Turned out that the code was checking for user having admin rights by comparing against the hard coded string "Administrator". The bug slipped through the JPN testing because in Japanese OS-es, the user groups are not translated and remain "Administrator" while in German, the user groups are translated into "Administratën" :) Well - lessons learnt: grep through the code to detect hardcoded strings to ensure they are appropriate and don’t do glob testing on a single platform to sign off. We now have clear buckets of issues that can be caught in each language - but you never know what else is missing!

-- Anutthara

 

Do you have a bug whose story you love to tell? Let me know!

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
  Thanks to you (Michael) for posting this series of Bugs from various people. This is a very educative one from testers like me. The question I have to you is - Are these testers not violating the Non Disclosure Agreement and or the Service Level Agreements and or Information Technology Security Guidelines set by the organization. @Anutthara, If I were you, I would have learnt that testing is a job of sampling and if one of the sample we picked appears to pass, there is no guarantee that other samples which look similar will also pass. Plus Our ability to pick good enough samples depends on our skills and the diversification of our tests. Plus Accidentally hitting a new area ( German OS ) helped you to discover a new sample in which the test fails and hence I would prefer accidental coverage as often as possible. Plus If I go through such blogs, it would helpful to me to avoid these mistakes and hence I need to devote time for constant education. Plus << but you never know what else is missing! >> If that is the case why do people have a sign off because we would never know what all we have missed? What do we need to educate our customers? What do we need to educate ourselves? Plus More... :)

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
  I was wondering while reading the article that the german word for "Administrator" in german was the reason, because in german you say the same. The letter 'ë' is also a good indicator that this word isn't german. This letter doesn't exist in german words and is missing on keyboards being used in Germany. When looking for Administratën in Internet Google came up with http://sq.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupi_i_Ekspert%C3%ABve_p%C3%ABr_Reform%C3%ABn_n%C3%AB_Administrat%C3%ABn_Publike so it more looks like an albanian version of Windows. Regards, Lothar

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
  There is no ë (or ï for that matter) in German. My guess is the "Adminstrators" group, that translates to "Administratoren".