[TRENCHES] Thursday, October 4, 2012 - Vox Populi
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Vox Populi
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/vox-populi
This is an Easy Job!
AnonymousWhen I was younger and a more junior tester, I did my time as a footslogger in the testing war. I flicked through menus, loading screens and fairly boring apps thousands of times.
In April 2010, I thought I’d finally broken into a more lucrative market. I was scheduled to test a mobile app. My fellow testers and I were shown into the ‘secured’ testing lounge - a converted cafeteria which had been installed with a multitude of sound-proofed pods and cubicles (the Devs wanted us to test in isolation for the first few days, before we all met up at the end of the week to combine our results).
I sat in my pod, and a mobile device was brought to me. As I fired up the program, I began to get excited. The premise of the game was simple enough - various food items would be launched across the touchscreen, and using my fingers I had to chop through these delicious consumables whilst avoiding deadly explosives.
So for a couple of days I sat riveted, slicing away. I didn’t even care about the repetition, it was refreshing to test a fun game. I didn’t even really need to fill out any bug reports, the app was working really well.
I gathered with my colleagues on the third day, excited to compare notes (and most importantly, scores!). We sat around a table with the Devs, and I reported first. I commented on some minor Scoreboard bugs, and a couple of crashes I had on loading screens. I also complimented on the nice Watermelon graphics in the game. Everyone was silent in the room - ‘Did … did no one else think the Watermelon was nice?’ I inquire.
The Lead Developer took the mobile device from my hands, before informing me that the app I should have been working on was a data management app for medical professionals. Apparently someone on the dev team had taken a test device home and their son had installed the game on there.
I was asked to leave the facility for wasting company time and money. No one seemed bothered that I had wasted my own time sitting in a booth playing phone games - though I suppose many people see that as a normal day at the office.
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But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
I'm not calling bs, but hrmm. You know. hrmmm
Yeah, how did he know to load up Fruit Ninja and not the actual app he was meant to be testing?
He's either an idiot or the company he was testing for are idiots for not telling what the app is they were testing.
Hell, why didn't he just ask?
- Story takes place in April 2010
- Fruit Ninja release April 21, 2010
- Release was on iPhone, Android wasn't until September so I don't see them testing at that point
- iPhone games tend to be paid for apps
- Developers kid installed the game, which had to be paid for, on a system that the developer took home(why wasn't there security measures on this?)
Sounds a bit fabricated to me, I would wager that it's more likely that the guy was just playing Fruit Ninja on his phone so much that when they went to have their discussion he blurted out Fruit Ninja stuff and got caught for not doing his work.
The story is a tad odd.
Well gosh, I suppose I might as well settle in for a nice cuppa ...... this is gonna be good!
More like it feels like some details are missing.
Too many holes in the story.
Crashes on loading screens didn't merit a bug report?
Not to mention the generally ridiculous idea that you would literally be shoved into an isolation cubicle with a test device (even though security is so lax that someone took it home and gave it to their son) and told, "Test!", and then have no other interaction with humans for two days.
It's a joke.
Yeah. I'm not sure I really understand Cora's, though. It looks sort of like an olive drab beekeeper suit with a safari hat. Doesn't have as much of the space cowboy thing which seems to be the theme of the game going on.
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I think she is supposed to be a female version of the stereotypical "kind of fat, grizzled miner guy." The old coot who'd been panning for gold and shouted, "NICE SHOOTIN! TRY ANOTHER ONE!"
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It was a tall tale from the trenches.
Also, I've done this sort of "shoved in a room and left to test" kind of thing before. It's possible that the only app on the device when he got it was Fruit Ninja. A lot of coincidences would have to collide for this story to take place, but it is totally possible. I just love that he was the only one accidentally testing the wrong app, and he went first at the triage meeting.
I think dawning horror as everybody else went around the room and explained what they'd found in the app he was supposed to be testing would've made for a funnier fake story, so I'm going to roll with "True" on this one.
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your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
Thinking about it, I suppose that is why it makes so much sense that the guy was fired immediately after the meeting.
in fact the whole game is based off of it
Actually there have been Games QA Hell stories like that in the past, whether Trenches or the Internet at large.
If the story is true it's because the company wanted to do what is called "Black Box Testing". Instead of telling you how to use the application or describing what it does, they give you as little information as possible to limit any preconceptions going into the test. Then you try to figure things out from the point of view of someone with no information, and they can use your feedback- if the feedback is "why does it take so long to get to the printing section" you can figure out that the print shortcut is probably not prominent enough on the screen, for instance. Or if they say "why can't I do X" then they can change the design of X to make it more intuitive.
It's entirely possible that the story is full of poop, but sometimes people DO take their testers and try to deliberately not give them any information before they start testing- it would be really dumb to take a tester from off the street or from a company you'd never worked with before and not even give them the name of the app they're going to be testing, though.
Yeah I assumed he was working for an outsource company that does testing for other companies, so he could be excused for not immediately recognizing, via the company logo, that he was in the wrong program.
It just seems like he would have had some kind of information to go on, even if he for some reason couldn't discuss it with the other testers. If that wasn't the case he probably should have made it more clear in his story.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
It's amazing how many people that know about HIPAA can't seem to get that it's HIPAA and not HIPPA.