A mild case of developer mentality

Its that time of a project again... The time when all (almost) the functionalities have been developed but not properly tested. Those frantic last days of development just before the release are - thankfully - over. No more late nights or working on weekends.
The time has come - for bug fixing :(

For me, there are two kinds of bugs that I really hate.

The first kind of bugs are those annoying UI related ones. Like the tabbing doesn't work. Or some cell renderer wont paint what we want it to paint. Or theres a bug for changing the background colour and its marked 'Critical' (???)

When a red blooded developer gets these kind of bugs we just want to roll our eyes and smirk. Oh come on, we think. Why can't they just click it if loses focus? Why can't they just press F5? Why cant they just use the bloody scroll bar? Why can't they just use their heads? Why why why?
Well the truth is, we're just being a little narrow minded. Maybe we've managed to design a nifty searching algo that's super fast and thread safe and does sql so efficiently that even the db wont know its being quried.
But maybe that search is only used in actual scenarios once every month and by very limited number of users, so that it being super duper isnt really that big a deal. Whereas that little bug that seems so silly to me, the one about the panel size - well maybe to a user that's really important. :)
Remember that time you went to buy a watch with a pale pink leather strap and the stupid sales person was trying to make you buy some thing that worked at 60 feet underwater?... Exactly! :D


The second scary bug type is the kind that are reported by QAs and take hours to reproduce. And they only gets reproduced in certain kinds of databases, in certain kinds of machines.

The steps to recreating one of these might go like:

1. Log in as user Johnny
2. Click A
3. Open B
4. Save
5. Open saved B
6. Log out without quitting
7. Log in as user Bonnie
8. Lock the computer and go out for an ice cream
9. First order a mint with chocolate chips
10. When the guy at the shop is about to take a scoop of Mint, scream 'STOP'
11. Change your order and ask for Butterscotch
12. At the counter, pretend that you haven't got any money.
13. Spend exactly 14 minutes searching your handbag for money and then suddenly pull out cash from your pocket
14. Pay and leave.
15. Come back to office and unlock
16. Try to log in again
17. System crashed.

Oh the horror of it.

It seems to me that QAs and developers have entirely two different attitudes. QAing is basically based on pessimism while developing is based on optimism. I mean we just build something, deploy it and then put our hands together (literaly) and pray 'Please work!' QAs on the other hand would run the app, smile evilly, say 'Please crash' and it does.

Anyway this is just a random ramble of course...I'm afraid I dont have some 'ruvan vaki' thats supposed to inspire everyone at the end. :) I can't really do 'ruvan vaki' ATM. Not with 20+ issues on my list :(