Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Not that difficult - or is it?

I tested a little new feature today. It did not take many hours to implement, but ended up taking more time test. The feature itself seemed to work nicely - in isolation, where it will never be. Investigating the feature in use within the product revealed that while it worked, other more relevant didn't after you had used this one. All in all, a galore of bugs in just about every aspect of the product context I could vary. Not only for the developer of this feature, but for the others - as this little addition brought out weakenesses in existing implementation that seemed fine without this.

There wasn't anything difficult I did today. I'm still half-headed from a long vacation and wanted to start off easy. Which leaves me wondering about what we're missing to miss out all the relevant bugs that just take a bit of patience to look for.

The testing I did today did not require much testing skill, but it required patience. It required me to try things that are somewhat similar but still different in some dimensions. I need to work on training patience to my fellow developers. Find motivating for that somewhat hard, as it seems our business has survived long enough without it - you could always, so far, fix the problem when someone complains about it within a day. The hard part is to find out the problems are there and leaving the hard parts for others - product managers, customers or maybe a tester - feels so tempting.