Test Guide

So, I am typing some value for a file name in the project palette in my product and I happen to type an invalid character in there which I don’t know about. I click on a button in the UI that should bring up a popup. Clicking on the button commits my...

The XAML editor would not show up if the user did not have admin access – Most dev’s and testers have full admin rights on theirs dev boxes so this would not have been caught unless the automation in the lab specifically ran on a user account with restricted...

Some time back, Alan Page sent me a review copy of How We Test Software At Microsoft (HWTSAM), which he, Bj Rollison , and Ken Johnston published late last year. I was curious to read this and discover whether their view of testing matches mine. Now that...

When we were very close to release of the first version of our product, I found a bug in which the product crashed on entering the license key :). Debugging the issue was a lot of fun for developers and regardless to say the bug got immediately approved...

I get excited about bugs, especially ones that I learn from. Years ago, I was testing some data mining software at a commercial software company. This was cool, since I majored in statistics at university, not computer science, so at last a chance to...

I once worked for a company that had a product that caused OTHER applications to crash. We didn't believe it at first. People would call our support line and complain that other apps would crash while using our product. But the crash was not reproducible...

You can call me Ishmael, err...Jake. We had been getting a bizarre error reported intermittently from the lab: 'No Disc Detected' modal message box. What was really bizarre is that the tests and machines it hit seemed to be random with no correlation...

I was giving the customer (Product Owner) a first pre-User Acceptance Test look at a modified Commercial Off The Shelf system. I tried to call up the history for one of the customer's workers on one of the administrator's pages. The worker was not found...

My life of late seems to be one bug after another. It all starts with my product: Live Mesh for Mac. I have set some setting on my Mactop that prevents our Mac client from running on it. No one else has reported this issue, and I cannot reproduce it on...

It is snowing here in Seattle today, 1 April 2009. Mum Nature evidently has a sense of humor!