Software Testing Blog

In the software testing business, GUI bugs (graphic user interface) are looked down upon – and rightly so. Nobody wants their users navigating through a visually defective application. Software should be clean, polished and aesthetically pleasing. You want your software to be George Clooney, not George Costanza.

But not everyone puts such a high premium on looks. Modern artists, in fact, are doing just the opposite.

Take “glitch art” for example. Defined by Wikipedia as “the aestheticization of digital or analog errors, such as artifacts and other ‘bugs’, by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices,” the trend is attracting more and more mainstream attention.

Wired’s UK site recently posted a fascinating piece on glitch art. They teach us, among other things, that the term is somewhat in dispute. For some, the glitches must be genuine (i.e. unintentional) while others insist that glitch art can be deliberately created, mainly through a technique known as data bending:

Databending draws its name from the practice of circuit bending — a practice where childrens’ toys, cheap keyboards and effects pedals are deliberately short-circuited by bending the circuit board to generate spontaneous and unpredictable sounds.

Databending takes a similar approach to circuit bending, using software to intentionally disrupt the information contained within a file. There’s all kinds of different techniques, some involving deep hex editing of certain parts of a compression algorithm, but other methods are surprisingly simple.

I bring this to your attention for two reasons. One, it’s cool. Two, we’re about half way through our Bug of the Month contest on Facebook, where a bug of this variety would almost certainly give you enough “likes” to be in the running for the Grand prize (an iPod Touch). Just saying.

Anyway, be sure to keep this in mind the next time you’re submitting GUI bugs. What you consider trash could end up being the next modern day Mona Lisa.