Test Guide

Problem: We had instrumented our code to spit out timing markers at various points of pages that were tracked via automation and measured actual end-user download times 24/7 on the production site. The results showed that 25% of the time the download...

Elfriede Dustin sent me a review copy of Implementing Automated Software Testing (IAST), which she and her colleagues Thom Garrett and Bernie Gauf recently published. I am familiar with some of Elfriede's work on test automation, so I was looking forward...

My favorite bugs are the errors that generate themselves recursively. I have two examples: The first involved an error logging mechanism that logged each exception in a database. At some point our database started throwing exceptions because the disk...

I was happy after I upgraded my laptop's memory from 1GB to 2GB until I noticed that sometimes XP just won't shut down when I try to hibernate. It sits there at "Save personal setting" forever. One day I put it to hibernate and before I saw it shutdown...

I opened a bug 1.5 years ago about an issue where the product would stop displaying updates to the user in a rare scenario dealing with boundaries; we have gotten customer reports about a similar issue that could be the same root cause and are linked...

My favourite bugs come not from our code, but from the code of the things we depend on, like the javascript engine or the .Net framework. Either performance, unexpected behaviour or plain and simple errors in code really throw one off when trying to determine...