I had to make this post a question because thereās no category for āsharing your hilarious storiesā. So feel free to add your own stories or experiences to this thread! Donāt feel obligated to give advice, but I will accept it. Would definitely prefer funny stories though.
Anyway, come in, come in, sit down, have a cup of tea ready to spit out.
Preface: I work with amazing devs who are not typically throw-over-the-fence types, and they have caught some pernickety bugs and are generally awesome, intelligent and caring. The tech function grew and we split our team in two. I went to team B, with one day a week on team A until we hire a new QA. The rest of the time, devs could test each othersā work.
Some of you might find that butt-clenching, but to be honest I was not worried at all. I love team A; theyāre competent and they care about quality. They really genuinely care. I had 0 - ZERO - worries leaving things in their capable hands.
Fast-forward to the end of a big olā epic, the whole plan coming together after weeks of work. Iād missed my 1 day a week for a couple weeks in a row (ill, then on holiday) so I hadnāt been around for a while. Still 0 worries. Team A, man. If you only knew. Team A is the absolute best. (Donāt tell Team B I said that.)
So I got back from holidays and the manager said āhey, do you mind changing your day this week to tomorrow so you can look through the finished work before we release it?ā I was like pfshh sure, not that Iāll find anything, because did I mention how great Team A is at testing? But you know, I didnāt mind so I swapped the days and here we are.
Pulled up the epic just to remind myself of the context, the raison dāĆŖtre of the work, if you will. Ah yes, I recall the refinement sessions now, the entire reason we started this was to ensure that our users couldnāt [redacted] when they [redacted]. Things got a bit scope-creepy in there and we pulled in a bunch of refactor work, probably nothing to worry about - super beautiful code now, you would not believe the beauty of it. 10/10 coding skills. (Woo, Team A!) But you know, at the end of the day, you gotta make sure the users canāt [redacted] when they [redacted], you know what I mean?
Obviously, I was not going to be able to [redacted] when I [redacted], and I was going to need to get some serious exploratory pants on to find any issues. I got out my android and iOS phones, my iPad, my Nintendo Switch and my tv with an awful in-built browser, and put them on charge ready to start. Reminded myself of the screenreader commands, opened up the dev tools and the api logs.
It began.
First I checked that the user couldnāt [redacted] when they [redacted], and they could totally [redacted] when they [redacted]! They didnāt even need to be smart to [redacted], they could just go right there and [redacted] however much they liked, while they were [redacted].
So anyway, now I gotta go eat my hat, which is sad because the hat was made of trust. xD A reminder that you should never lose sight of your goals, or the context of your work.