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Admin
Vote #1 Clive Palmer
Admin
TRWTF was not attempting to contact Mary by employing the techniques of telephonic communication (I'm fairly sure such technology was available in those days, although whether it existed between Texas and California is anyone's guess) to attempt to get her to explain how she duplicated the bug.
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Ah, must be the StyleWorks program GS Works. They were acquired by ClarisWorks in 1988 and the program was renamed AppleWorks GS. I wrote a lot of school reports in that program. Had to save every minute or two because you just never knew when it was going to crash.
The number of bugs in this application was legendary.
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So can anyone explain what was exactly happening? how the contrast control has anything to do with the screen deforming? i'm old enough to have had various CRT's, but i don't remember anything like that...
Admin
I thought it had something to do with magnets near the monitor. Close call.
Admin
Hey this bug sounds exactly like the bug reports we get from our client's hotshot devops.
Them: Hey this thing isn't working!!!!!!!11one Us : Please supply steps to reproduce the issue. Them: This thing isn't working and the users are breathing down our back please fix ASAP!!!!!11one Us : If you don't supply us with information we can't guarantee a fix, but we can poke around to see if we see something. Them: WHATEVER USERS NGGGHHH Us : <go away and spend a week looking through code> Them: WHY IS THIS BUG STILL OPEN GRAAAH Us : We couldn't reproduce it. Them: Nevermind that there's something more urgent that's come up, look at that instead BECAUSE USERS!!! Us : Okay. <original bug falls to bottom of pile> <a month later someone closes that bug because it hasn't been worked on> <a month later a new bug report gets filed for the same feature/part of the system, again without a repro, and the cycle of stupidity begins anew>
Admin
Why would you ever close a bug report just because it hadn't been worked on yet?
Admin
On most TV set if a white bar on a black backround is displayed, a small smear appears: when contrast and brightness are turned at the maximum the effect will be more noticeable, with the smear that could be bigger.
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I nailed it at the bug description. Thinking about CRTs, it was obvious that it was a malfunctioning or incorrectly set CRT monitor that caused the screen image to distort when too many bright elements where displayed on screen. (or a too big bright area was displayed)
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Trouble ticket from Airplane pilot to airplane mechanics: "Something loose in cockpit"
Ticket close with comments: "Something tightened in cockpit."
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"Weird noise when flying fast." -Can not reproduce on ground.
Captcha: Ingenium - Invention by a genius that even baffled him.
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My company has annual "mass closures" where they close every open bug that isn't actually being worked on. It's a little hellish.
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"Dead bugs on windscreen"
"Live bugs on back order"
or better yet
"throttles stiff to operate when friction lock engaged"
"Thats what they are there for!"
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I agree it was obvious. A monitor problem was the first thing that I came to my mind. Strange that the developers didn't think of that, that kind of problems were pretty common with analog monitors. At least with the ones I had.
Admin
Yeah seriously, did no one even think of doing this? WTFs all around but just thinking, "oh silly user," even if they are stupid is no excuse for not getting the information you need to solve the problem from them.
Admin
1988 was before the dominance of Lotus? Lotus took the world by a storm by the mid 80's, long before 1988.
Admin
Bad writing. Bad historical research. Bad.
1988 was NOT (not, not, not, not) before the dominance of Lotus 1-2-3. In fact, by 1988 early versions of Excel for Windows were starting to break that dominance. I first used Excel on Windows 2.0 in 1989, before the emergence of multi-sheet Excel files with embedded chart objects made the rickety set of project-estimation sheets I built more feasible to implement. So yes, I did that one the hard way, because the easy way didn't exist at the time.
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Also, I also diagnosed the cause immediately when the phrase "screen turns all curvy" was used (which shows my age and then some). Old green-screen CRT monitors (and TVs) tended to do this when you had a lot of solid block colour. The confirming factor was that it happened when she selected a lot of rows, which would have probably been inverse selections.
Admin
The real problem, for Mary anyway, was X-Rays from the blooming CRT.
Admin
I got my start in QA in the early 90s. Where I worked, bug reports with no steps to reproduce were closed immediately by the lead developer. So I learned how to write a good bug report and wound up doing a lot of the diagnosis before I even submitted it to the developers. I made it easier for the developers and they always took my bug reports seriously.
I made the transition from QA to DEV a long time ago. I think I write less buggy code because I can look at it from a QA perspective. I wish I could immediately close those one line bug reports I get now from the "Marys" I have to work with. Some of them don't speak English very well, so maybe I shouldn't expect much in a written bug report. Some of them barely seem to have any computer skills at all, and that is hard to tolerate. The developers don't have much respect for the QA team and it makes for a tense if not hostile work environment.
I think many companies under-estimate the value of a good QA team. IMHO, a good QA tester is just as important as a good developer.
Admin
The WTF here is they didn;t let the engineer go for being an idiot. 3 Months before even thinking about contacting Mary and also for not thinking this was anything other than the obvious CRT property it was IMMEDIATELY. Looks like Steve was a worse engineer than Mary was QA. Being a software engineer in those days was no excuse for not realising the bleeding obvious.
Admin
As someone who started with TV-like monitors on a TRS-80 model I, yeah, this was super obvious. Now Mary may have been a moron, but the developers can't have been much higher on the evolutionary ladder.
Admin
That's right guys...
Observe how the author quakes in fear of your superior knowledge of the fledgling spreadsheet industry from 30 years ago, and know you've won this battle.
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According to the description, the bug has been worked on - trying to reproduce it counts as such, IMO.
When working with bugs in some Bugzilla instances, I've made the experience that any number of "hey, we can't reproduce the bug, can you please tell us how to do that?" comments will often achieve nothing. But close some users' bugs (that have needinfo for weeks), and they are much more likely to protest and provide the requested feedback :)
And if they don't, then it is one less weird bug no one else can reproduce you'll have to worry about when reviewing the open bugs.
Admin
I don't know what their problem was. This was chock–full if info compared to most my bug reports from clients. This had the problem and the steps to recreate, brief though they might have been. (And I'm not certain it was even a pebkac error, given they might want to account for it, somehow. Or at least discuss it and take it under advisement.)
Most of my bug reports are, essentially, "A user had a problem"
Admin
You guys should hire someone to make up more believable stories.
Admin
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FYI: If you genuinely believe that someone is a berk, and you call them a berk, that isn't trolling, it's voicing an opinion.
Admin
Misguided quantitative management would be my guess.
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My favorite bug report ever was when I was working for a company that made a software product for medical office management. Our only product was software for doctors. And one day I got a message from our new receptionist saying, "Some doctor called. He said there's something wrong with his computer."
What more could one want to know?
Admin
Because you are rated based on how long bug reports are open. If you close the bug report and the user re-opens it, the clock is reset.
So many silly people try to get ahead by working really hard and doing a good job. The secret is to figure out how the scoring system works, and then do the things that boost your score.
Admin
lol
Can we add some Mary to open source projects ?
Admin
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That's what I was expecting.
At an engineering company in the early 1980s, one employee would call up nearly every morning to complain that her VT100 monitor would not respond. So every morning I would walk down two or three flights of stairs to her office and press the ^Q on her monitor for her. Eventually, she learned how to press the ^Q herself, but it took quite a while.
Admin
CRTs operate with an analog signal that contains the video and the sync information. A sync signal would consist of a pulse that is "whiter than white". The width of the sync pulse determined whether it was a horizontal sync pulse (scan line) or a vertical sync pulse (full screen sync).
Sync pulses get filtered, and an excessively wide bright white would start to leak through the filters and get interpreted as a sync pulse. This causes the horizontal sync circuit to see a less than perfect sync pulse that wasn't consistent, but tended to vary, creating a wavy look on the screen.
Admin
I wish I could immediately close those one line bug reports I get now from the "Marys" I have to work with. Some of them don't speak English very well, so maybe I shouldn't expect much in a written bug report. Some of them barely seem to have any computer skills at all, and that is hard to tolerate. The developers don't have much respect for the QA team and it makes for a tense if not hostile work environment.
Sad commentary. There are some good, thoughtful testers out there but a lot of companies don't know how to/don't care about hiring them. Seems like the train of thought is this: 1) we need testers because, you know, we need them 2) how do we get the cheapest ones. End of inquiry.
Admin
Can someone explain the Mars Rover reference? It seems just as bad as the lotus notes / excel references IMO.
Sure, the rover had a few computer problems, but successfully landing robots covered in sensitive equipment on planet is an incredibly hard thing to do in itself, let alone have everything work without a hitch once you get it there.
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Not the ROVER, the ORBITER.
The Climate Orbiter malfunctioned and broke up in Mars' atmosphere because someone wrote the guidance software to give results in Imperial units when the flight software was expecting metric.
Admin
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I tend to say: before your are allowed to call yourself a programmer you have to work as a system administrator for 2 years to learn how bad software can be to administer and configure. Then as a maintenance programmer for two years to learn how bad written code can be. I think I must add working in QA for two years to get the experiance lizardfoot have got! Well done!
Admin
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Back in those days, I was still using a spreadsheet program called 20/20 (on Data General MV10000 running AOS/VS).
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problem: evidence of hydraulic leak on starboard oleo strut resolution: evidence removed
problem: engine #3 sometimes missing resolution: engine #3 discovered after brief search of right wing
problem: aux dme radio fails as configured resolution: reconfigured with power switch in ON position
Admin
I've worked at a place where they would have expected us to make it work without touching the monitor. We wouldn't have been able to but that's what they expected.