Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Party Trick

Over time in QA we get really good at remembering bug numbers. These are the defects we see for several nights in a row, or the bugs that tear through a whole swath of tests, or the defects that recur again and again.

It's a little eerie how things come out of memory, even after the bug has been closed:

30969: single scenario failure in concurrent transaction test
PERMA-11108: warning in the Java build
32273: performance issue with extremely large directories
etc....

I'm pretty sure this is a useless skill. But it's kind of fun. Plus I look really smart in meetings when I can just bring these out, computerless!
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5 comments:

  1. JessDAugust 4, 2009 at 3:31 PM

    There's a corollary to this; you ever been the one in the QA department that can't do this? Yeah, it makes you look smart, but an inability to do it makes you look dumb when others can.

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  2. Catherine PowellAugust 4, 2009 at 3:35 PM

    Ha! Too true!

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  3. AnonymousAugust 4, 2009 at 4:56 PM

    I think I remember 30969. :-)

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  4. Kashif Ali HabibAugust 5, 2009 at 1:33 AM

    nice post,

    Good memory always helps testers :)

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  5. Rachel SilberAugust 5, 2009 at 11:36 AM

    It risks making the conversation somewhat opaque to people who don't know the bug numbers. In a scrum that I participated in, there was one person who would refer to his tasks by the ids they had in the tracking system we used. Since I hadn't memorized the ids he was working on, this meant that to find out what he was talking about required an extra clarification step. (But sure, it is a fun party game to know the bug numbers, and one I've certainly played myself.)

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