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Admin
And all these years I've thought having a QA instance was the way to go. Now I see the light. QA testing should be done on prod with an understanding that orders to Test Company should be ignored.
Admin
About 9 months ago I was working for a reatail consultancy doing a bit of work for one of their clients. There was another team at the consultancy who were doing a major overhaul of a major UK retailers website, specificaly integrating the existing site with a new merchandising engine that did the whole 'Users who brought x, also brought y'
Hundreds of times a day automated load scripts ran on the UAT enviroment for several months leading up to the launch, these scripts ran all day long. The test script developer picked two films out at random, which happend to be an 18-rated porno, a rammstein album and a childrens film, the script purchased them.
What he didn't realise was that the UAT system was actually going to be the live system when the switchover took place on the going live date.
First day of the launch resulted in the quicked bug fix ever, people looking at childrens dvd's were also being peddled german industrial rock and porno's in the cross merchandising section.
Brilliant!
Addendum (2008-02-05 10:53): Sorry,
Brillant!
Admin
I can see this becoming an internet meme. I have no clue what it would mean, but who can't help but smile at "I've Got The Monkey Now".
Admin
Ok, so why not create a fictional document called "Everything you ever wanted to know about qwertyuiop, but were afraid to ask", price it up at $0.01, and then fire anyone who then puts it on a bestseller list?
Admin
this is fantastic. really, one of the best stories i've ever seen on here.
Admin
Anyone who played older versions of Firearms Mod for HL might remember Capture The Monkey mode...
Admin
TRWTF(TM) is Marketing.
[image]Admin
Why do people keep mispelling "brillant?"
Admin
"HBSP has since changed their aggressive testing policy."
Why? The test procedure was more effective than required, not only showing that the web site worked, but that marketing's procedures worked, successfully identifying and promoting a best selling article. They need more tests like this to also include inventory, personnel, accounting, enterprise strategy, etc. --Rank
Admin
I'm curious how you fixed that.
Was there a "rule" added that certain genres wouldn't display while you were looking at other genres? i.e. don't show Sesame Street at the same time as Debbie Does Dallas.
Or was the QA data just deleted and let the chips fall where they may?
Maybe dear ol' dad likes to order adult movies and then feels guilty and orders a movie for the kids at the same time.
Admin
It wasn't me, just the team next to mine, The lead developer effectivly hacked something like this straight onto the live server... (I think it was JSP...)
foreach (Media m in this.media.AlsoBrought) { if (m.Rating == Rating.U) && (this.media.Rating != Rating.Adult)) { // display } }
(of course that is .net, but you get the idea)
Admin
Here a link to the WFT that started this whole thing:
The Brillant Paula Bean
Sorry I didn't post it originally, I was out of linker fluid
Admin
FYI, I believe the name of the organization is the Harvard Business School Press.
Admin
Well, what with having a dyslexic brother who is far brillanter than me (no surprise there), this comment just about made my day. Paula may not have been good for much, but her legacy is, undoubtedly, brillant.
But in other news: I'm curious to know why anybody in their right minds would employ a tester to type "asdfasdf" into a dialog box. I'm just a humble programmer, still working with punched cards and looking forward to my first course in "Cobol: The Final Paragraph," but I have a horrible suspicion that it is possible to make computers do this for you. Couldn't they just put a batch-job in, using all this new technology stuff like XML and wooden tables?
And, of course, the words "monkey" and "tester" have nothing in common at all.
No, wait ... it's the Harvard Business School. For a moment there, I thought it was something technical. Or at least not totally meretricious.
Addendum (2008-02-05 19:20): That was, in fact, a reply to Grovesy (175059). I assume his posting was in process at the time. Apologies.
Admin
Ha! Man, do I love this site.
Admin
I think it might actually be cheaper to just hire some goon to test your site than it is to hire a guy that actually knows how to wire up these web-based integeration and end-to-end tests. If it was for school, I'm sure they just picked up some undergrad and payed him $5/hour to type in the same stuff over and over again.
Here's what actually happened with the WTF, though. In the distant future of the year 2002, the "Single Search Result" failed on the "monkey" keyword. As a result, the administration sent a lone QA tester back to the year 1998 to prevent this from happening. His mission: make sure there was extensive testing of the "monkey" keyword to avoid the failure in the future. Little did they know that his extensive testing would cause the failure in the first place!!! DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN
P.S. The Terminator TV series is kinda crappy...
Admin
Well, I think there are a couple reasons:
Of course, it always looks this way until you weigh in the cost of maintenance, which no managers ever do. It's a lot easier for a developer to fix a broken script than a broken tester.
Admin
Can I pet your monkey?
Admin
Oh, I also think that a lot of testers are hired with the goal of doing the manual testing "for now", while they also work on an automated test. After a while, job security dawns on them so they find every excuse they can to delay automated testing development and keep doing it manually. Sometimes they even write "tools" that make it harder for anybody but them to manually test.
Admin
Admin
if your testers have lots of down time, perhaps either they are not working hard enough. Or you are not working hard enough. Testers should never have free time. They are the slaves of the developers.
Admin
Admin
The next time you're in an empty row on that overbooked flight, remember to thank TEST/IMA MRS and TEST/A MR.
/seen that way too many times.
Admin
Bug or not, when the very famous business owner phones up and says 'Why the hell are we pedalling porn to kids. Fix it now or I won’t sign the cheques', it becomes irrelevant if it was an oversight in the specification or something that was specified but missed in development. The former is a specification problem the later is a bug.
Admin
It seems to have outlived the old "The goggles! they do nothing!" which used to occur in nearly every thread...though, I think that one was here fist.
It is impressive 10 lines (including whitespace) of "code" can inspire pages and pages of brillant comments...
Captcha: Genitus - what is that? I think its the name of a Roman general known for having a large "amount of daring" but I can't be sure...
Admin
You must be new here. (TM owned by /.)
Why do people keep misspelling "misspelling"?
Admin
bring -> brought buy -> bought
Sorry but my brain takes (throws?) exception when the two are mixed.
:P
Admin
i think cellocgw and dextron both missed steve's joke :-\
Admin
At the end of every year, eBay released a list of the top-ten search terms used on their website. Typical top-ten terms were "BMW" and "Gucci" as well as other higher-end "Rodeo Drive" style items. And every year, USA Today and other mainstream media outlets would write an article about how well the economy must be doing because everyone on eBay was searching for high-ticket items.
Earlier this decade, eBay released an upgraded search product written largely in-house. A monitoring infrastructure was customized to ensure smooth functioning of this new search product.
USA Today again wrote their annual report on eBay search terms, but in 2004, there was a surprising change... no longer were the "Rodeo-Drive" items topping the list, no... in the words of the USA Today writer, the sudden appearance of "moon" and "RV" strongly suggested "...that people are returning to their childhoods for comfort in discomforting times and that we are captured once again by dreams of space travel..."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-12-29-ebay_x.htm
Other journalists concluded that the US Economy was heading for recession as the desire to find "RVs" meant less spending on more frivolous items.
The truth of the matter is, the two engineers who developed the monitoring infrastructure for the new search product simply wrote scripts that searched multiple nodes, 1000's of times each day, for search terms that would be considered somewhat improbable by anyone else: their initials or their last name.
Admin
Admin
As horrible as the old name of this site was (not the really old one that happens to be the same as the current one), this really is "worse than failure". It would have truly been better if this system had fallen over and died rather than producing volumes of erroneous data that the marketing people didn't notice until years later and made important marketing decisions based on. Of course, the author of the original book must have been pleased.
Admin
It's a very early WTF article called The Brillant Paula Bean where someone mispelled brilliant.
Admin
I remember a coworker was testing something on a commerce site, and placed an order worth several thousands of dollars(the most expensive thing this site sold was about $100, so a several thousand dollar order was out of the ordinary), and instead of using a test address, he used his home address.
The company fulfilled the order...but we ended up needing to tell them what happened. The person we dealt with took it with good humor, but i think management was somewhat irked.
Admin
I thought that myself at first, but upon reflection, it wasn't quite clear whether Steve was (a) making a deliberate Paula reference or (b) meant to ask "Why do people keep misspelling this as 'brillant'?". In either case, the misspelling of "misspelling" may have also been either intentional or accidental).
Admin
Admin
Look carefully at what Steve wrote. He knows this; that's the joke!
Admin
Okay, I feel like an idiot now. I'd never noticed that "The Brillant Paula Bean" was misspelled. I've been reading this site since the start.
Admin
Admin
A coworker at my last job tested a credit card function on his own card - with a $100 pre-authorization, which affected his limit until it expired several days later. We made sure to stick with $1 after that (I think some processing houses reject anything smaller than $1).
I'm pretty sure your story has more oomph, though; not for the price of the goods (the goods just went back and forth, and the price never came out of your coworker's pocket), but for the cost and time sunk into shipping them.
Admin
Admin
Yeah, a natural reading clearly leads to that deduction, but so many WTFs are tied up in sloppy English, after a while you start instinctively running things through the "what other meanings might have been intended here?" filter.
Another wording of the possible alternate intent is "Why do people keep typing the misspelling 'Brillant!'?" Of course, only the OP knows for sure; to borrow an adage from another forum, the telepathic plugin is still about five years out from a gold release...
Admin
Admin
I would tell the QA team to use a test server, but it's six to eight years too late to do that.
Admin
Testing against a real database is daft. It's a kind of daftness that is commonly exhibited by otherwise intelligent people, but it's still daft.
Testing should only be conducted against a non-live, non-shared database (unless testing capacity, in which case it can be shared, but not a live business database).
This is the kind of stupid thing that happens when you test against a real business system.
Admin
I think they probably missed it because it would appear Grovesy went back and edited the original post which meant the joke didn't work as well anymore.
Admin
One of the best WTF on this site. Specially since you have offered proof that this existed.
Admin
Admin
They should spank that monkey for failing the test cases!
They should also spank them QA testers for not deleting the records.
In addition they should hire a monkey-spanker manager to lead the monkey-spanking department to ensure that marketing gets their head out of their rear.
Admin
It's much weirder than that. This whole thread has been edited. My second post where I friendly-like say that Brillant is a inside joke is gone, and that nested quote in my above post was added by someone else. That post was a followup to my prior, now missing post.
And the captcha reminds me of "The Crying of Lot 49"
Admin
The real WTF is testing against production - don't they have a test server or some sort of prod mirror????