Back when I was the “new guy” code monkey at a fairly sizeable brick-and-mortor-and-e-retailer, I let the intrusive thoughts win and did some impromptu QA on the e-commerce site. (In the test environment. Don’t worry.)
It handled things like trying to put “0” or “-1” or “9999999999999” or “argyle” quantity of an item in the cart just fine.
But I know my 2’s-compliment signed integers. So I tried putting “0xFFFFFFFF” quantity of an item in my cart. Lo and behold, there was now -1 quantity of that item in my cart and my subtotal was also negative. I could also do things like put a $100.00 thing in the cart and then -1 quantity of something that cost $99.00 in the cart and have a $1.00 subtotal.
(IIRC, there was some issue with McDonalds ordering kiosks at one time where you could compose an order with negative quantities of things to get an arbitrarily large unauthorized discount.)
The rest of my team thought I was a fucking genius from that moment on. I highly recommend if you’re ever the “new guy” dev on a team and want to appear indispensible, find a bug that it would never occur to a QA engineer who doesn’t have a computer science degree to even test for.
A long time ago I was the guinea pig/first user for a company developed system.
I often had my 1 year old at the time son with me when I worked on the weekend. He had a great time smashing buttons on the keyboard and randomly clicking the mouse on the test version. He found most of the bugs.
The amount of times colleagues would dismiss bug reports because “they couldn’t reproduce” my steps rapidly declined when they didn’t only get the steps based on the video, but also the video.
Take that Daniel, you lazy <beeep>
Taught our test infrastructure to record and attach those recordings to the reports, too, before the manufacture of the testing tool implemented that. Good times.
The McDonalds thing was simple. 90 cent burger, minus cheese, was -10 cents. Or something along that way. Basically the “hold the cheese” value was fixed but they forgot some items with cheese are piss cheap.
Back when I was the “new guy” code monkey at a fairly sizeable brick-and-mortor-and-e-retailer, I let the intrusive thoughts win and did some impromptu QA on the e-commerce site. (In the test environment. Don’t worry.)
It handled things like trying to put “0” or “-1” or “9999999999999” or “argyle” quantity of an item in the cart just fine.
But I know my 2’s-compliment signed integers. So I tried putting “0xFFFFFFFF” quantity of an item in my cart. Lo and behold, there was now -1 quantity of that item in my cart and my subtotal was also negative. I could also do things like put a $100.00 thing in the cart and then -1 quantity of something that cost $99.00 in the cart and have a $1.00 subtotal.
(IIRC, there was some issue with McDonalds ordering kiosks at one time where you could compose an order with negative quantities of things to get an arbitrarily large unauthorized discount.)
The rest of my team thought I was a fucking genius from that moment on. I highly recommend if you’re ever the “new guy” dev on a team and want to appear indispensible, find a bug that it would never occur to a QA engineer who doesn’t have a computer science degree to even test for.
A long time ago I was the guinea pig/first user for a company developed system.
I often had my 1 year old at the time son with me when I worked on the weekend. He had a great time smashing buttons on the keyboard and randomly clicking the mouse on the test version. He found most of the bugs.
You must have been lying close attention to see how they were triggered though.
Bug reports can be tough if you can’t repeat them. I’m glad you got some bonding time with littlie though, especially if you were on the clock.
Screen recording rules.
The amount of times colleagues would dismiss bug reports because “they couldn’t reproduce” my steps rapidly declined when they didn’t only get the steps based on the video, but also the video.
Take that Daniel, you lazy <beeep>
Taught our test infrastructure to record and attach those recordings to the reports, too, before the manufacture of the testing tool implemented that. Good times.
Just install a keylogger as well
You’re hired
The McDonalds thing was simple. 90 cent burger, minus cheese, was -10 cents. Or something along that way. Basically the “hold the cheese” value was fixed but they forgot some items with cheese are piss cheap.