Bugs and emotions

After deciding to get married, I floated my profile across various matrimonial websites in India. Matrimonial websites in India are as popular as dating websites in western countries and the net savvy generation of India who decides to get married, try to find their partner over such matrimonial portals.

The current generation is pretty much aware that they need to diversify their search and hence they register in all websites that provide an online matrimonial service. Myself being a part of the same generation and moreover a rapid tester who knows that I need to diversify too, I did it.

I floated my profile across several matrimonial websites or in other words diversified my search. And the story begins...

Each of these websites send updates and information about new people getting registered or brief profile information, matching hard coded criteria of a partner to an e-mail id that a user specified during registration with these websites.

I did get a lot of automated e-mails about new people registering and about people who are matching my hard coded partner search. I was skeptic about these websites as they would spam my inbox and hence created a different e-mail id for partner search and used that for registration. I am now happy that I used a different e-mail id for registering with those websites.

On reading one such e-mail which claimed to have a list of people who matched my hard coded criteria, I found a link - to login and look for more such profiles. I clicked the link and it took me to login page. I used the e-mail id and password to login.

"Congratulations, you have successfully expressed interest to Profile123_XYZ" , flashed on my screen and left me puzzled.

Jesus, I just logged in and I never intended to express interest to someone. I was wondering if I clicked the wrong link. I logged out and looked for a similar e-mail that I received from the same portal and there again I saw a link in the e-mail that says: "Click here to look for similar profiles" . I took a risk of clicking the link and logging in... Bingo, it's reproducible.

I then had to write to those two people explaining what had happened and apologized in case they might have been hurt by someone expressing interest to marry them and retracting the interest later.

I don't intend to reproduce that ( could be a bug ) more than once and keep playing with emotions of people ( which includes me). The first thing I did is to delete my profile in that specific portal, unregister with them.
So far, I haven't seen such a thing happening in other portals that I have registered my profile and kinda feel safe.

There is more than one possibility to such a thing happening:

1. The text in the e-mail was not linked properly.
2. A bug in the program - an integration issue or anything else, too .
3. It might be a mistake of mine too. ( I cross-checked and it appears to me that I did what any other user would and did not click on a link to express interest )
4. Something(s) that I am failing to see.

Bugs that play with emotions:

There is no better context for me than this to explain that bugs play with emotions of people. The lesser the bugs in all products you use the better your health. Such bugs cause a stress/strain to your mental health and you never know that such bugs are slow poison.

In my opinion, under the context explained above, we ( testers) make the world better. We catch most of these bugs that could otherwise affect the emotions of people and help them live longer, peacefully.

We aren't paid for that, either! :-)

Well, here is a little secret of becoming a good tester - Be happy, be humorous and you see you do lot better testing !

I have observed a few discussions from a few testers in few online groups who state, testing as an activity that affects their personal life. Aren't they FOOLS?

Testers are ones contributing towards making world a better place!

Lesser bugs in products, happy is the customer, longer he lives, more he pays, more you get paid :)

Interacting with experts like James Bach, Michael Bolton, Jerry Weinberg... I realized that they have a great sense of humor and in my opinion that is another reason why they are experts because their humor is always accompanied with a thought process to all who laugh at the joke.

A discussion of metrics took place between a group of managers from one of India's most respected IT company with Michael Bolton when they invited him to their office during his visit to India a few months back. Michael Bolton, in my opinion is not just a test expert but a philosopher too.

The managers there asked Michael Bolton, "Is there a better way to measure the health of the project than the metric we are collecting?"

MB: "Oh yes! Check the Blood Pressure of your team members after a meeting or few days away from shipping date"

LOL! Wasn't he joking and at the same time making sense about a metric that could be more practical than the metric that people collect to check the health of the project ?

Jerry Weinberg, recently wrote a fairy tale to help test managers learn a lesson. I heard from MB that Jerry Weinberg also used to "smell" the health of the project. My manager once said "Pradeep, please go home, take bath and come back. You are stinking". I had stayed 3 days 2 nights and that is the kind of pressure that people today work in.

"Jerry, your metric works!"

The experts are all happy people and make others happy because they realize, as testers and as philosophers, they have made/making the world a better place each day.

If you aren't happy as a tester, it might be because you aren't aware that you are making the world a better place.

I am one of the happiest tester in this world and I need not be an expert to say this. Let's see who is lucky to marry one of the happiest tester of the world ;)

So, if it works for you, start looking testing as an activity of giving and taking happiness to and from the world. You might see yourself testing in a lot better way.


-- Pradeep Soundararajan - pradeep.srajan@gmail.com - +91-98451-76817

"Pradeep's first language is not English--his first language appears to be testing." -- Michael Bolton