Scott Lock's Blog

There's no comments because the code is complicated to write therefore it should be complicated to read!

Seriously...The funnies thing I have ever heard a tester say...VERY TRUE STORY

I had to post this as it actually happened to me today...

We have an application that accepts contact information for individuals.  During testing the Tester entered a bug in the tracking system that said (and I quote) the "The Phone Number field has a bug that does not allow it to accept alphanumeric characters". 

During the follow up meeting, sort of perplexed as to why this is a bug, I asked the Tester to explain what he was thinking.  He said, (and I quote) "It should accept alphanumeric values in case someone wants to add a phone number like 1-800-CALL-ATT".

I almost fell out of my chair.

Does anyone else find this as funny as I did?

 

Posted: Jun 19 2003, 11:49 PM by Steelcuda54 | with 32 comment(s)

Comments

TrackBack said:

Phil Scott's WebLog
# June 19, 2003 11:49 PM

Ritchie Hughes said:

Yes, it's definitely funny, but only if you look at it from a developer's perspective. Take a step back and think about what this comment implies about the differences between you and your customer. Customers don't _care_ if it doesn't fit the technical spec or if it doesn't adhere to your strongly typed data model. They just know that when they hit 1-800-CALL-ATT on their phone it dials and gets them through. OK, I realise it's not a great example because the whole point of aliased numbers is not needing to store them in a PIM, but here's another example: in Internet Explorer I put "cars" in the address bar and hit enter. According to the spec for URL resolution that should fail because there's no peer named "cars" on my LAN. But as a user, that's probably not what I _meant_. I don't care what the RFC says, I just want websites about cars. So the application anticipates this and sends me to www.cars.com or a search page about cars. As a user I'm happy. My point is this: users don't think like you, they don't click like you and they don't use key combos like you. They adapt and traverse the interface to match their own mental models. So stay one step ahead, anticipate their _every_ move and let them store whatever the hell data makes them happy. But yes, it's still funny :-)
# June 20, 2003 12:58 AM

Scred said:

Sounds like pretty valid feedback.
# June 20, 2003 9:20 AM

Jeff Julian said:

Maybe you should accept alphanumerics but convert them to the numbers that are associated with. Very funny story. I old co-worker used to be the best at finding bugs in entry points of our system because he lived in a town called "Lee's Summit" with the ' in the name. He would break my sites in a minute. I miss that :).
# June 20, 2003 9:47 AM

stefan demetz said:

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/stefandemetz/archive/2004/02/06/6748.aspx
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