I am mad…..
One of the teams I am working with logged a defect recently on an ATM machine they were testing. The machine made a strange noise while reading the card. The functionality that had been newly added was a chip card reader so was different to the readers that had previously been in the machines. The noise was loud… noticeably loud, or they would not have logged it. It wasn’t occurring on all the ATMs with the new reader, but only a couple of them. It was also different from any “card reader noises” that they were used to hearing.
One of our developers had some MAJOR objections to our defect. The first thing he said, really made me mad. He said that a “tester’s personal subjective view should not result in a defect”. According to wikipedia, “Subjectivity - refers to the property of perceptions, arguments, and the language terms use to communicate such, as being based in a subject point of view, and hence influenced in accordance with a particular bias”. Surely, he had a subjective point of view that the noise was not a problem??!
The second thing he said, almost made me madder. He questioned the use of the word “funny” as a way of describing the noise. “Where is the “funniness” threshold for mechanical equipment defined?”, he asked. What would have made more sense? Is there a scientific term that would have convinced him that it warranted a second look?
Thirdly, he questioned us sending the defect to business after the technicians had decided it didn’t deserve further investigation. We did as we always do, i.e. highlight the problem as we see it, and send it to the people that need to be aware, and need to be given an opportunity to question or accept the answer. In my view, the team did everything right.
Anyone disagree? Why do we constantly get attacked for doing our job?
2 comments:
Louise,
I lost your blog for a while so I didn't see this post (RSS problem)
I would agree that your team did everything right.
One thing that isn't clear from your post is what you did in response to the developer reacting this way. What approach did you take?
You posted this blog quite some time ago so now the bug has been in the system - what happened to it? Any similar incidents?
Hey Adam, sorry for only replying now.
Well, when I picked up what had happened I was no longer actively involved in the team. In any event, I think that the way I would have handled it then and the way I would have handled it now would probably be quite different. Back then, I would have probably been quite confrontational and possibly rude. Having taken bug advocacy, I would approach it from the "how do i get them to pay attention to this and really try and look at the underlying problem". So I would probably worded the bug differently in the first place, done some follow up testing to ensure I was reporting on the most serious evidence of the failure, and that I had more information around the critical conditions and then tied this back to stakeholder value.
To answer your question in terms of what happened to the bug.. well they went through a few changes to both the application and the firmware for the reader itself.. I am not close enough to the detail to be 100% sure, but I believe it hasn't resulted in anything serious and is no longer as "noisy".
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