1mo ago

Asking the real questions

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Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user's legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.
Georgia has simple rules where a child's forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.
Tenessee seemed to only require that a child's name was writable under some writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.
At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn't enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.
- Sounds like you did a thorough job as a QA tester. As a software engineer, I love to see it.
  
  By the time the app was due to go live, we'd only reported bugs with the signup and login flows. This was misinterpreted as there only being issues with the signup and login flows, and the app launched on time. In reality, it was impossible to get past the login screen.
  
  And then let me guess... Of course the QA testers get the blame, when in reality it's either management or marketing that wanted to pushe the app out.
  
  Blaming us would be too close to root-cause analysis for them even to consider. We weren't normally QA testers, but they'd left it until too late to hire internal QA, so roped in the developers (us) from a SaaS vendor their app replied on as emergency QA.
- im sure the devs tasked at fixing that bug loved u ;-)

219 comments