Software Testing Blog

Worldwide productivity surely took a nose-dive today, as thousands of worker bees (like me) discovered that Google was featuring the classic Pac-Man arcade game on its ever-changing homepage. What began as a scholarly search for “regression testing tips” quickly devolved into “five” minutes of ghost-chomping fun – but don’t tell my boss.

In honor of Pac-Man’s 30th birthday, Google developed the application (in what we presume is HTML5) to look, sound and behave just like the original version from 1980. [UPDATE: Here's how to download the Pac-Man game for free] We’re not yet sure if this includes the infamous Pac-Man kill-screen bug, but I am determined to find out. I’ll work nights and weekends if that’s what it takes. That’s just the kind of dedicated employee I am.

Anyway, since we’re a software testing company, many of us in the office were curious to see how the application would perform on the various mobile devices we have in-house. Here’s a quick run-down of our findings for each device, including whether or not it worked, along with a few notes:

• iPad: Yes. The game was a little difficult to play with the touchscreen at first, but keep in mind this coming from a devoted Blackberry user.
• iPhone: Yes. No major issues to report.
• Blackberry: Nope. After clicking on “Google Classic” I was at least able to see the application, but I had no luck getting it to work. If I’m missing something here, please let me know.
• Palm Pre: No. Touchscreen would not cooperate.
• Droid: Yes, although touchscreen again made it difficult.
• Nexus One: Yes. Good thing!
• Cappuccino Maker: No. Likely a hardware problem.

Great job by the Google dev team. And happy birthday, Pac-Man.

Now leave me alone, I have more “work” to do.