knickknackz

Really, if it was a heart problem, they’d fix it.  But say it’s related to toenails…it might wait until the next release.

So this field is full of lingo that doesn’t always make sense to outsiders.  For example: “no repro” which roughly translates to “could not reproduce the error.”  This is a lovely for both developers and testers. When approached with a bug that is most likely their fault, if they can’t get the bug to happen again following the same steps, then it can be sort of dismissed with the note “no repro.”  After all, how can you fix a problem that doesn’t seem to exist?

A second comic in the bizarre world where medicine is more like software development.  This is based on the way that sometimes when you discover a problem with a program - you don’t fix the problem, you just change the specifications (”the spec”) to say that the program is supposed to do that.  It’s way easier!

So there was an off-hand remark during my all-day training that I’m doing this week about how a particular coding mistake was a lot like when a doctor says “whoops” during surgery.  And then I thought, huh, I’m really glad that the field of medicine has so many careful safeguards and immediately thought of a couple of bizarre scenarios.

Unfortunately, it was pointed out to me that people that AREN’T in the software testing field probably won’t get the joke. Sigh. Was that an appropriate place to use the word “ain’t”?  Anyway, the point is that developers might often fix a bug, as well as something totally unrelated, at the same time (which actually does make sense for being efficient).  Then it often falls to the software tester to make sure that nothing is broken really quickly.