Farewell 2007…

Well, a new year is upon us, and I’d like to thank everyone who has checked in on my blog this year. As a rough guess, my readership has quadrupled or quintupled this year. Google Analytics gives me a nice perspective on this:

As a personal highlight, I stuck to the blogging commitment I made for myself at the beginning of 2007. This year, I’m hoping to get a little more reference material on the site. This will cover test strategy, testing heuristics and checklists. I’m also going to try and fix the styling on blog entries in the RSS feed.

I came across a few interesting real-world bugs in the last month or so. Without further ado, here they are. I’ve mapped them to some new-year resolutions.

Be discrete

Don’t show people anything you don’t want them to see.

This screenshot came from an online competition. I expect they’re showing me a little more than they expected to. URL hacking is your (testing) friend.

Don’t be negative

This one was interesting. I haven’t had time to investigate, but can imagine a few scenarios:

Finally, the classic. It turns out that the developer of this Sega title didn’t expect anybody to keep playing this tennis game after there was no further reward. Specifically, they didn’t expect anyone to troll through 70 more games of tennis when there was no longer any scope for player development.

The cool part of this bug was that I initially missed it. My points total was at 125, and I played another round. I saw the score go to 126 without realising that the score was actually minus 126. My initial thought was that the developer had simply limited the score to 126 as a maximum. But, like a true tester, I decided to play one more round just to make sure that there was nothing else strange going on. It was then that the score continued its overflowing, and went to minus 121. I had to look really closely to notice the minus sign, as my brain assumed that the dash was simply a separator between the point label and the point value. Pushing further made the bug more obvious. Now to find out if the overflow can overflow into anything important.

Anyone for 65,280 games of tennis?