Jason Stanley's Blog

Testing - a lesson!

Posted on 4th Apr. 2012 in General

Developer: Has the testing been completed?
Boss: Yep, everything looked great.
Developer: <slightly puzzled> No bugs found then?
Boss: Nope, its great.

So, your gut says something funny is going on here. You are good but not that good. Someone always finds something. Even if it isn't a bug someone always queries something which they feel may be a bit off. No feedback means everything was implemented perfectly. Very very odd. However.. its your boss, you aren't going to ask if he is telling a porky pie are you.

Launch day comes. 3... 2... 1... *cross fingers* GO!

Lets do a quick bit of live testing. Looking good! It hasn't crashed! There are no errors. Let me just take a peek at... wait... what the... it can't be... oh shit.

So you switch in to crisis mode. What is actually broken. The main feature is a bit fudged. However everything else appears to be fine. The bug looks simple. The new feature has to be activated to be viewed. There is only a small percentage of users online. Lets try to fix this in 15 minutes. If that fails we can rollback (It should be noted that if this was a critical service breaking feature it would be an instant rollback).

What else is broken? Before fixing I get everyone I can find to test it again. At which point I get asked "again? I haven't tested it at all..." There we go.. confirmation. No group test was performed.. great. 

If anything else comes up I will rollback. I then proceed to fix this fairly critical bug which was missed during development. Takes about 8 minutes. Do a bit of browser testing. Apply patch. Test on live server. Hurrah!

Other tests start coming back. Fine, Fine. Then I get the "I am not sure if this is a bug...". A screenshot and 2 minutes later and that is fixed as well. 

This time I was lucky. Next time.. who knows.

Test.. Test.. Test and if you think it is working... TEST IT AGAIN!