Bad Excuses

Friday, November 27th, 2006

My Dogs presents his top 20 replies by programmers to testers when their programs don't work - listed here together with Billy Hollis' (tester) responses to top 10, nice:

20. "That's weird..."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?"
14. "There is something funky in your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module in weeks!"
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just some unlucky coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!" - A: Correct, that's why I found the problem.
09. "THIS can't be the source of THAT." - A: Yes, it can.
08. "It works, but it hasn't been tested." - A: Non sequitur.
07. "Somebody must have changed my code." - A:  Then change it back, please.
06. "Did you check for a virus on your system?"  - A: Yes. Several times.
05. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it feel? - A: Like it doesn't work.
04. "You can't use that version on your system." - A: - Yes, I can.
03. "Why do you want to do it that way?" - A: Because I'm emulating a clueless user who might do it that way.
02. "Where were you when the program blew up?" - A: In my office, finding yet another bug in your code.
01. "It works on my machine"- A: We're not shipping your machine.

As Dan Schu comments: "...the answer to the 'it works on my machine' problem is to manage standardized shared testing environments (lab machines or VMs) and to carefully control all variations in the test environment. A developer will typically run a self-built component which is almost certainly an invalid test environment, i.e. it might be debug, and the end-user never has the compiler installed, etc."