Software Testing Blog

You – the second person English pronoun.  You are the one reading this article. You were Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006. You are special. You rock. Our company name is all about you and testing.

You have also been very naughty. Check out this Twitter entry written by you:

I kill people who nudge me

Wait, that wasn’t written by you? It was written by someone else named You? Oh, our mistake. And apparently it was Twitter’s mistake too according to this article on TechCrunch.

Twitter likes to tell you who is doing what and when at the bottom of each tweet. For example, a post description might tell you that it was retweeted by a friend.  Or if you were the one doing the retweeting, then the post description should say that it was retweeted by “you”.  But what happens when a buggy hyperlinking algorithm decides that anything after the words “Retweeted by” should link to a Twitter profile?

“Retweeted by you” becomes “Retweeted by you” – as in twitter.com/you. And you sounds cranky.

There are a lot of good lessons here for testers and developers, but I want to highlight a few particular:

1.) Try to think about all of the use cases, not just the obvious ones. This bug would never appear if a tester just browsed a Twitter feed looking at everyone else’s entries. To find this bug, a tester would have to retweet something themselves and then check the output.

2.) Testers should always think about the big picture. A narrow-minded tester would simply make sure the hyperlinking algorithm worked by checking the output for a few sample retweets. Once the tester saw the links were correct, they would say the algorithm was good to go. On the other hand, a big picture tester would look at how the single algorithm affected the overall user experience from start to finish.

3.) Go beyond just looking at the application – interact with it! This bug also appeared as a problem with the pop-up hovercards that appear when you move your mouse over a Twitter link. By simply hovering your mouse over “you”, Twitter asked if you wanted to follow “you”.  You should ponder that paradox while writing that bug report.

Do you have any other lessons? You the reader?  Not you, this guy.  He sounds unhappy.