Vuvuzela Testing

Software Testing here not only happens under annoying background noise, it is a great challenge for people who want to test their nerves under a constant exposure of weird irradiation.

Do-it-yourself Virus

Great innovations and lots of new ideas are emerging.

Behind the Scenes of Chaos Software Ltd.

If you are familiar with Gary Larson you might recognize the scene as close related to one of his creature cartoons where the dinosaur stands in front of its calendar striking each day out ("kill something and eat it"). I hope Gary forgives me for the similarities, but the scene fits perfect to our common experience.

It Works on My Machine

I am sure that any tester has received a message like this at least once in his life as a tester. But to be honest, it happened only rarely to me.
Such a rare incident occured recently when we detected an optimistic lock exception in one of the WebServices under very specific caller scenarios on one of our integration test environment.

However, the developer could not reproduce the error on his workstation and although he was  already running a newer version of the code, he was actually right.

It turned out the problem occurred on a clustered environment only where several containers and nodes are running in parallel. Lesson learnt: It doesn't need to be the programmer who broke a piece of software. Sometimes other influences lead the software to behave different. Here it was the environment in which the software was running.

Defibrillator

Actually a good idea to install a defibrillator at a place where all hell breaks loose with this never ending deployment virus . I just hope, none gets the idea of using this machine to improve test efficiency and giving some testers an extra shake...

Different Goals

When a tester didn't find any cool bugs, then he basically has two options to think about.

a) The software is good enough to go live
b) The software wasn't tested well enough

Typically, the developer thinks it is "a". And, of course, the tester always fears it could be option "b".

Very First Exception

While I got some emails where people voted this cartoon as excellent, I must admit that there was quite a bunch of people who didn't get the point.

I don't know how the story of Aladdin is told in English spoken areas, but here in Switzerland and probably also in Germany you must use a cleaning rag and wipe it over the oil lamp (well here it's rather a teapot) to get the ghost out of it. In this cartoon it is the small bug that went over the teapot. He triggered the event for the Ghost to come out and of course, he didn't see anybody.

Cartoons that need explanation are probably not worth getting published but here I still think it's worth it.

Someone asked me whether ghosts really cast a cloud over the floor... Actually a good question. Don't know, I never met a ghost.