Happy tester day

    On this fall day, we wholeheartedly congratulate people who daily struggle with the imperfection of the world. These people are not visible, but from this their hard, painstaking work does not become less important. After all, without them, a lot of products, especially software ones, would not work correctly, with a lot of errors, glitches and oddities. Today we congratulate all testers on the professional holiday!

    Perhaps, each of us in one way or another is faced with testing or checking something in their work. And as a student, I began my journey in the IT world with this profession. By the way, it is thanks to one of the testers that we owe the appearance of a new meaning to the word “bug”. And the word itself migrated to the Russian language. And in many others too. Nobody knows for sure when the word “bug” was first used in its current meaning, as far back as 1878, Thomas Edison wrote:

    This was repeated again and again with all my inventions. The first step was intuition, followed by a flash, then obstacles arose - and they disappeared, then Bugs arose - the so-called little flaws and difficulties - and it takes months of constant search, research and hard work until success or failure.

    However, if it weren’t for the moth stuck in the contacts of the computer on September 9, 1947, it is not known whether we celebrated this day today or someday? On the occasion of the holiday, we conducted a survey among our testers and found out what qualities an ideal tester should have, and also asked us to tell the story of some interesting or funny bug from practice. Read their stories under the cut.

    Alexey Petrov (@pifagor_mc), Director of Quality, Mail.Ru Mail:

    An ideal tester should be curious and inquisitive, attentive, moderately meticulous and focused on the result. In addition, the tester should have patience and self-control, as well as communication skills. The tester, however, like any other modern specialist, must constantly work on himself and develop, but in the case of the tester, these are simply mandatory features! The tester can not stop there, it is worth blinking, and technologies, methodologies and procedures will fly away into the future, leaving a gaping specialist with a broken trough of unclaimed knowledge.

    Once upon a time, at the dawn of my career, having gotten into one fairly large well-known company, a tester handed me the task - to test one of the company's products for informational purposes. At that time, I was just just beginning to take my first steps in testing and was not sure that I would like to do this seriously. But literally after 10 minutes of “playing” with the site, to find various kinds of defects and product features, I came across a small pop-up window with a short text: “But there is nothing here, but we like your train of thought, come to us to work as a tester.” And a contact phone in addition. I remember, then it inspired me very much, and I felt that I was not only not mistaken by the company, but also by my profession. Almost 8 years have passed since then, and I’m still in testing and I’m not at all sorry about the choice of the vector of my professional growth. :)

    Anton Belous (@AzzuTribal), Testing Specialist at the Mini-Game Studio: A

    tester needs to have an abstract way of thinking. Have the ability to go into the shoes of all types of users.

    Oh yes, just the other day there was one number. I tested the achievement in the game, which is given when writing comments in the chat game. Achievement is called "Lord of the chat." And, as you know, an auto-ban is issued for a chat mate. If you write a word in three letters in the chat, you will get the achievement "Lord of the chat" ... and ban. Moreover, the very juice of this bug is that to play it you need a player who has just registered in the game, and this very word was his very first comment in the chat. I present the expression on his face when he, in addition to the ban for the mat, receives an achievement and money for its receipt. :)

    Ahmad Bugaev(@cyber_initiative), Testing Specialist, IM Department:

    I can’t say anything about the ideal tester. I have never seen such. But a good tester should have incredible patience, concentration, a fair amount of criticality to everything around it and have a life slogan in the form of the question “what if ...?” And even if the product turned out to be really good, the tester should always be dissatisfied with it.

    There was a case when they talked with a friend on ICQ and started arguing over a trifle. I then walked along the street and scribbled messages on the go. The correspondence began to come to a standstill, and my friend angered me to such an extent that I wrote a huge angry message with a detailed argumentation of my innocence, which was to smash him in this debate. But it turns out that there was a bug in ICQ under Windows Phone that, when trying to send a sufficiently large message, it simply disconnected the application from the network. While I tried to send a message and realized the bug, the anger passed, and the understanding came that this trifling argument is not worth friendship. There is no bug for a long time, but a friend remains. :)

    Andrey Zaitsev (@ Ukrop4ik), Junior Testing Specialist, Allods Studio:

    1. Pedantry bordering on paranoia
    2. Patience
    3. An ingenuity

    “Mimocrocodile can go into the profile of the chewbuck and see its info.” All bugs are interesting, all bugs are funny. But you need to have a large layer of contextual information, an uninitiated person will not always understand what is at stake. The above bug describes features: forum, profile, user rights. Where “mimocrocodile” is an unlogged user, and “chubaka” is a user without access to a closed beta. The very name of the bug, which sounds in our highly specialized, within the team terminology, sounds funny. :)

    Ksenia Razvenskaya (@choise), head of the Mail.Ru Search testing team:

    So, the perfect tester. This is a person whose life does not work for everyone: applications do not start, site layout spreads out at a glance, and all electronic devices cease to work in his hands. The tester must be very attentive so as not to miss anything, and patient so that he painstakingly checks everything. The ability to think outside the box and critically, intuition and ingenuity will help to find the most inaccessible and hidden problems. Also, the tester needs to be curious and inquisitive: "what if I ..." and then everything breaks down! Sociability and the ability to clearly explain your point of view are also important, because testers have the widest communication on the project, they should listen to his opinion. And it’s also very important: the tester must be a hyper-responsible person, since a lot depends on the quality of his work. An ideal tester could be an ideal person, but he also has his own professional shortcomings. Of the negative qualities, I would call meticulousness and perfectionism, they should not be brought to the limit, but to some extent should be present in every good tester.

    I remembered one funny bug: in our search there is a special result in the search results with the results of sports matches. Well, for example, at the request of [CSKA Spartak] in the first position we will show the result of the last match between these teams: go.mail.ru/search?q=sska+spartak . It is known that every football team has a nickname, the search also knows about it, therefore, in the list of all football teams for Spartak, for example, we have a synonym - “meat”. Because of this, a mixture of sports in the issue can be seen by such funny requests as [horses for meat] and the like: go.mail.ru/search?q=kone + for + meat . At first we were going to fix this bug, but in the end we decided to leave this behavior as a feature, now this is another “Easter egg” that can entertain the user.

    Stas Fomin(@ EXE777), head of the ITT Nord studio testing group:

    It seems to me that the list will be impressive, but I will try. The ideal tester is attentive, responsible, sociable, proactive, honest, open, understanding, friendly, conformist, perfectionist with non-standard, critical thinking.

    I'll tell you a bug from the life of our office. We recently moved to a new office, with magnetic locks on the doors to the office and key cards, security - everything is as it should. But, we all know, when in the morning, when going to work, you put on other pants or a jacket, then the necessary magnet from the office will remain in the old ones. So it was with us, but the tester's ingenuity finds a way out of any situation, and it turned out that if the same size credit card was inserted into the opening between the door lock and the magnetic closure with the narrow side, it exactly goes there and pushes magnetic latch on the door to the office! So even if you forgot the key at home, you can always find a bug, in this case, builders. :)

    Alena Babkina (@dzhelita), Senior Testing Specialist, Alloda Studio:

    Ideal testers, like ideal software, do not exist. Take the average, abstract tester in a vacuum, without dividing by the positions that it can occupy. I suppose that you are interested in precisely human qualities. Then:

    - sociability: you need to communicate and have good relations with everyone, starting from PM and ending with the support service;
    - responsibility / attentiveness / lack of nonsense: everything is clear here, we are responsible for the quality of products and / or their components;
    - stress resistance: as a rule, we are primarily in demand if critical bugs fall on production. There are a lot of complaints, conflicts arise + it is imposed that you need to contact with a large number of people;
    - perseverance / patience: especially if you want to perform some kind of routine monotonous work (usually in the position of a simple performer);
    - perseverance / ability to defend your point of view and push it to the end, if it can bring profit to the project / work processes;
    - healthy curiosity / curiosity and desire to learn / openness to new knowledge;
    - critical thinking.

    I’ll finish this, you can continue for a long time, if you describe the “ideal” tester.

    Alexandra Kitova (@skvot), Testing Specialist, Game Operations Department:

    The question, in fact, is very controversial. In our company, I managed to test both software and games. She was engaged in testing both on mobile devices and on PC. Of course, one can name the general qualities that, of course, are necessary for absolutely everyone in our hard work: attentiveness, perseverance, stress resistance. But just different qualities were defining everywhere. For example, for testing on smartphones, you need to be prepared for the so-called “semolina work” - you have 20 devices in front of you, and on each you need to check the little feature added by the developers. This is very tiring. Now I play games, and here I consider the ability to work in a team to be one of the most important skills. From each person taking part in the life of the project - from the artist who develops fonts for the game’s website to the chief game designer, demiurge of the game world - the overall picture depends on what the end user sees, and, in my opinion, it is the testers who are the connecting links in this chain. Therefore, it is so important for us to be sociable - who, if not us, will control the entire development process and prove to programmers that this is not a feature, but a bug? :)

    Now I am mainly engaged in localization testing, so there are more than enough funny text bugs. So I can immediately recall only one more or less interesting bug: in our Warface game, after one of the patches, the shot from the shotgun flew like a bullet, that is, the player could jump, shoot at the player on the other end of the map, and he received full damage as from point blank shot.

    These are the stories our employees told. I take this opportunity to remind you that we really need good mobile application testers. How do you relate to testing? Tell your stories in the comments.

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