In the corner of my eye were multiple colours, glitching away vying for my attention. The screen shone brightly as I glanced over my left shoulder.
I wondered, is it doing that for a reason? Or is it bust? Ah, it’s broken! Somebody needs to fix that!
I reflected on how something so broken unintentionally brought my attention to the shop inside. I wonder how many other people look inside the store because of the broken display?
Did it impact my view of the quality of said company, not really. Maybe I thought they could do with paying more attention and is this representative of their service? But that’s a push, if anything it just got my attention!
What bugs have you seen that, while a bug in isolation, could positively impact some other part of a product or service?
Well, Naming no names When I worked for a betting company, they had a Virtual Racing betting market.
Concept is there are virtual races for many different sports i.e. greyhounds etc and it has betting markets (the same for real races).
Usually, the market closes before the race begings
Then one day, I noticed (in production) that the market was still open as the race was progressing - the race finished and the market was indeed still open - So the opportunist out there in the public would have had a great experince betting their life savings on the winner they just seen get past finish line )
Is it a bug? Hell-yeah! Did it postively impact the service? Yes, if the opportunist out there spotted it
(film reference and spoiler for those unfamiliar):
The book is a reference to the film Back to the Future Part II when the character Biff travels back in time to give his younger self a book called “Sports Almanac” with all the results of various sporting events. Thus allowing his younger self to bet knowing the winner and turning himself into a millionaire to change the outcome of the future in 1985.
It doesn’t help the users but there are a fair few bugs - or at least behaviour that isn’t exactly as it should be - that I use in my testing, usually in setting up very specific test cases with a ‘neutral variable’ blocking out a lot of noise. Should that neutral variable be ignored by the system? Not really, but the benefit to me is much more than the cost of the bug
When I worked for a betting company, they had a Virtual Racing betting market.