Always & Never - Featured TestSphere Card

Hi everyone,

@berenvd has asked if I would be interesting in writing the feature card post this month for the Club, and so here I am :slight_smile:

One hundred cards. One hundred Test-related concepts.
Here on the club, we’ll feature a card from the TestSphere deck for people to write their stories about every month.

I challenge you:
Take a few minutes to think about your experiences with the featured card.

What bugs have you found that are related? Which ones have you missed?
How have you tackled testing for this concept?
What made it difficult or more easy?
What have you learned? What can others learn from your experience?

Take one of those experiences and put it to prose.
Telling your stories is as valuable to yourself as it is to others.

2 Heuristics12

I’ve tested internal and external websites at the company I work for, and validation testing is a part of it that I loved doing, and I see validation rules as being an example of Always and Never.
If the requirements say a field can only be X characters long, or only allow alphanumeric characters, I immediately start wanting to find out what happens if I break those rules. Generally nothing bad happens, which is good we’re trying to prevent the bad things getting out. But one time I had a text field that should have had a 10 character limit and I could paste in 1000 characters, I had to go back to the developer and question what happened. Whilst pressing next only ended up keeping the first 10 characters given, it wasn’t obvious nor the best customer experience.

Also, I imagine I’m not alone when coming up with a test scenario, only to be told “That will never happen”. And yet deep down, you know if you don’t try it, it will find a way to happen once it has released.

What’s your story?

2 Likes

Thanks Lee! I owe you a drink!

We were once tasked with the requirement: "Getting a result from any action in the product should never exceed 3 seconds."
A.k.a. a user should never wait longer than 3 seconds for their actions to show a result.
This prompted me to look for rather heavy combinations in search of the product. Since it was a data heavy solution with tons of dependencies… well… it didn’t take long for me to find some rather nasty situations.

After confronting the stakeholders with these findings they worked together to get the requirement changed.

“Getting a result from any action in the product should never exceed 3 seconds, except for the following: …”

There’s >always< an exception to be found. (see what I did there? :wink: )

1 Like