The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2014-08-29 Reply Admin

The real WTF is that you can not test a sanity check (or limiting function) if you can not enter wrong data. So both sides have f-up.

2014-08-29 Reply Admin

cyborg:
Norman Diamond:
Norman Diamond:
Accalia Elementia:
So.... is TRWTF that what.thedailywtf.com is down?
What happened, a hard discourse failure?
What did SMART testing say?
It said you're not smart enough for Discourse.

Ouch. That smarts.

tin · 2014-08-30 Reply Admin

C-Derb:
The way the story is laid out, it sounds like the tester rejected the code change because he could only enter 53.1234567, but could not enter 123.12345678 to verify that only 7 decimal places were allowed.

The way the story is laid out, the tester asked to have it limited to "7 decimal places", but the developer interpreted this as "7 char" and limited the input incorrectly. That's how I read it anyway.

If the above is true, the follow on gets really bad: The developer then "fixed" the problem by calling the tester an idiot and truncating their valid input. Let's hope they never need to transfer anything over $9999999, because someone's going to be pissed off with the massive discount.

2014-09-02 Reply Admin

tin:
C-Derb:
The way the story is laid out, it sounds like the tester rejected the code change because he could only enter 53.1234567, but could not enter 123.12345678 to verify that only 7 decimal places were allowed.

The way the story is laid out, the tester asked to have it limited to "7 decimal places", but the developer interpreted this as "7 char" and limited the input incorrectly. That's how I read it anyway.

If the above is true, the follow on gets really bad: The developer then "fixed" the problem by calling the tester an idiot and truncating their valid input. Let's hope they never need to transfer anything over $9999999, because someone's going to be pissed off with the massive discount.

No, the final solution was:

"Allow more than 7 decimals in the Security Price field. Round to 7 places if more than 7 are provided"

So the developer apparently knows we're dealing with decimals, not characters. The only mention of "characters" was by the user, and I expect it's more likely for a user to abuse terminology than a developer.

2014-09-02 Reply Admin

noname:
The real WTF is that you can not test a sanity check (or limiting function) if you can not enter wrong data. So both sides have f-up.

But, um, why do we need to test a feature that doesn't exist? I don't see anything in the requirements for passing invalid input along to a separate check.

I agree that there should be such a check, in the code, and it should be tested, but this should be done via the developer's own unit tests. There's nothing in the story that says this wasn't done, so where is the WTF? The story is about user testing. Users shouldn't be "testing" the function of a code path that should never be reached in a correctly functioning app.

2014-09-02 Reply Admin

cyborg:
TRWTF is that the GUI would be trusted with this. If you need to restrict something then whatever is generating or passing that value should be doing so. Relying on the GUI to generate correct values and having downstream things accept that as Gospel is a recipe for fuck-ups. Restrictions in the GUI should be considered a sanity check - not the solution.

Recipe? My good sir, that is batter, pan and pre-heated oven for fuck-ups.

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