Happy Tester Day

On this autumn day, we heartily congratulate people who struggle daily with the imperfections of the world. These people are not in sight, but because of this, their hard, painstaking work does not become less important. Indeed, without them, many products, especially software, would work incorrectly, with a large number of errors, glitches and oddities. Today we congratulate all testers on their 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, thanks to one of the testers, we are obliged to the emergence of a new meaning in the word "bug". And the word itself migrated to the Russian language. Yes, and many others too. No one knows for sure when they first began to use the word “bug” in its current meaning, back in 1878, Thomas Edison wrote:

This was repeated again and again with all my inventions. The first step was intuition, an outbreak followed, then obstacles arose - and they disappeared, then Bugs arose - so called minor flaws and difficulties - and months of constant search, research and hard work are needed before success or failure.
')
However, if it were not for the moth, stuck in the contacts of the computer on September 9, far 1947, it is not known whether we celebrated this day today or even some day? On the occasion of the holiday, we conducted a survey among our testers and learned what qualities an ideal tester should possess, and also asked to tell the story of some interesting or funny bug from practice. Read their stories under the cut.

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

An ideal tester should be curious and inquisitive, attentive, moderately meticulous and focused on results. In addition, patience and composure should be characteristic of the tester, and communication skills should be developed. A tester, like any other modern specialist, must constantly work on himself and develop, but in the case of a tester, these are just mandatory features! A tester should not stop at what has been accomplished, it is worth blinking, and technologies, methodologies and procedures will fly away to the future, leaving a gaping specialist at a broken trough of unclaimed knowledge.

Once upon a time, at the dawn of my career, having settled into one fairly large well-known company, the tester handed me a task - to test one of the company's products for educational purposes. At that time, I was 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 the “game” with the site to search for various kinds of defects and product functionality, I came across a small pop-up window with a short text: “But there is nothing here, but we like the way you think, come to work with us as a tester.” And contact phone number. I remember that this inspired me greatly, and I felt that I was not only mistaken about the company, but also my profession. Almost 8 years have passed since then, and I am still in testing and have no regrets about choosing a vector for my professional growth. :)

Anton Belous (@AzzuTribal), testing specialist for the studio Mini-games:

A tester needs to have an abstract way of thinking. Have the ability to enter into the skin of all types of users.

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

Ahmad Bugayev (@cyber_initiative), IM testing specialist:

About the perfect tester can not say. Never seen such. But a good tester should have incredible patience, concentration, a fair amount of criticality to everything around him and have a life slogan in the form of the question “what if ...?” And even if the product turned out really good, the tester should always be dissatisfied with it.

There was a case when they communicated with a friend in ICQ and started arguing over a trifling occasion. I then walked down the street and scribbled messages on the go. The correspondence began to come to a standstill, and a friend infuriated me to such an extent that I wrote a huge angry message with a detailed argument of my rightness, which was to smash him in this dispute to smithereens. But it turns out that in ICQ under Windows Phone there was a bug which, when trying to send a large enough message, simply disconnected the application from the network. While I was trying to send a message and realized the bug, the anger passed, and it came to be understood that this trifling dispute was not worth friendship. The bug is long gone, but the friend has remained. :)

Andrei Zaitsev (@ Ukrop4ik), junior testing specialist at Allods studio:

1. Pedantry bordering on paranoia
2. Patience
3. Shrewdly

"Mimokrokodil can go to the profile of the boob and see his info." All the bugs are interesting, all the bugs are funny. But you need to have a large amount of contextual information, the uninitiated person does not always understand what is being said. The above bug describes the features: forum, profile, user rights. Where "mimokrokodil" - not logged in user, and "chubaka" - user without access to the PTA. The very name of the bug, sounding on our narrowly specialized, within the command terminology, sounds funny. :)

Ksenia Razvenskaya (@choise), Head of the Mail.Ru Search Test Team:

So, the perfect tester. This is a person whose life does not work: applications do not start, the layout of sites is spreading at one glance, and all electronic devices stop working in his hands. The tester must be very careful not to miss anything, and patient to check everything thoroughly. Ability to think outside the box and critical, intuition and ingenuity will help to find the most difficult and hidden problems. Also, the tester needs to be curious and inquisitive: "what if I ..." and then everything breaks down! Communicability and the ability to clearly explain their point of view are also important, because testers have the most extensive communication on the project, its opinion should be listened to. And it is also very important: the tester must be a hyper-responsible person, since much depends on the quality of his work. An ideal tester could be an ideal person, but he has his own professional flaws. 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 issuing 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=tska +spartak . It is known that each football team has a nickname, the search for this also knows, therefore, in the list of all football teams for Spartak, for example, we have a synonym - “meat”. Because of this, the mix of sports in handouts can be seen on such funny requests as [horses for meat] and the like: go.mail.ru/search?q=connections + on + 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 amuse the user.

Stas Fomin (@ EXE777), head of the ITT Nord 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 is all right. But, we all know, when in the morning when you go to work you dress 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 sharpness finds a way out of any situation, and it turned out that if you put the same credit card of the same size into the opening between the door lock and the magnetic lock with a narrow side, it goes right there and moves it away magnetic door latch! So even if you forgot the key at home, you can always find a bug, in this case builders. :)

Alena Babkina (@dzhelita), Senior Testing Studio Allods:

Ideal testers, as well as the ideal software does not exist. Take an average, abstract tester in a vacuum, without dividing into positions that he can occupy. I suppose that you are interested in human qualities. Then:

- sociability: you need to communicate and be in good relations with everyone, starting from PMA and ending with customer support;
- Responsibility / attentiveness / lack of pofigism: everything is clear, we are responsible for the quality of the products and / or their components;
- stress tolerance: as a rule, we are primarily in demand if critical bugs end up in production. There are many claims, conflicts arise + the fact that you need to contact with a large number of people is superimposed;
- perseverance / patience: especially if you need to perform some routine monotonous work (as a rule, in the position of a simple performer);
- perseverance / ability to defend their point of view and push it to the end, if it can bring profit to the project / workflow;
- healthy curiosity / curiosity and desire to learn / openness to new knowledge;
- critical thinking.

At this end, you can continue for a long time, if you describe the "ideal" tester.

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

The question is, in fact, very ambiguous. In our company I managed to test both software and games. Engaged in testing on both mobile devices and PCs. Of course, you can call the general qualities that, of course, are necessary for absolutely everyone in our hard work: attentiveness, perseverance, stress resistance. But it was precisely the defining that were a little different qualities everywhere. For example, for testing on smartphones, you need to be ready for the so-called “seamy workout” - there are 20 devices in front of you, and on each one you need to check the small features that the developers added. It is very tiring. Now I am engaged in 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 designs the fonts for the game site, to the main game designer, the demiurge of the game world - the overall picture that the end user sees and, in my opinion, testers are the links in this chain. Therefore, it is so important for us to be sociable - who, if not we, will control the whole development process and prove to programmers that this is not a feature, but a bug? :)

Now I'm mainly engaged in localization testing, so there are plenty of funny text bugs. Just like that, I can only remember one more or less interesting bug: in our Warface game, after one of the patches, a shotgun shot flew like a bullet, that is, the player could jump, shoot a player at the other end of the card, and he would receive full damage from shot at close range.

These are the stories told by our employees. Taking this opportunity, I want to remind you that we really need good mobile application testers. And how are you related to testing? Tell your stories in the comments.