5
Glasses and the sorry subject of our story sat in office chairs next to each other along a long desk set against the far wall of the lab. Merciless fluorescent bulbs overhead hummed alongside the ever-present roar of recycled air. The lab had three rows of desks, each with a television, a VCR, some cheap headphones, and an Xbox on it. You could fit three teams of unwashed bodies in that bad boy.
The recently promoted needed to learn how to do the job he hadn't earned, so he stayed late in the mostly empty lab to learn how to write bugs, compile a report, and create a master VHS tape with Glasses. It's less exciting than it sounds, however it sounds, but it was our hero's first taste of disciplined testing. A method. A code. A formalized tact oriented towards articulating exactly how fucked up something is versus how something is supposed to be. A solid skill in a world owned by ideologues.
A monster was born that Tuesday evening in a corpo-office tower in that swamp.
Glasses asked, '“So, ever written a bug before?”
“I have zero literary ambition,” Rob lied.
“Good,” Glasses seemed relieved. “Writers always write the worst bugs.”
“And books,” Rob added. “I read a real stinker the other day. Halfway in I was sure a writer wrote it, so I checked the author's bio. Sure enough. A writer.”
“What are the odds?”
“Hitler wrote a book, you know.”
“And?”
“All you need to know right there.”
“Right,” Glasses blinked. “Writing a bug is real simple. You got a title, description, repro rate, repro steps, expected result, and actual result. You follow?”
“You lost me at title.”
“Right,” Glasses repeated. He seemed to do that whenever encountering something stupid and couldn't just leave. “The title. Your bug title needs to be short, sweet, descriptive, and include the outcome. Something like, ‘Crash occurs while attempting to enjoy Hello Kitty's Island Adventure’ or some such. Something with a hook to grab triage's attention.”
“What's triage?”
“A bunch of assholes. Nothing you need to worry about now. You need to worry on your descriptions. A description expands on your title. It tells people what is going on and why you're wasting their time with a bug report. If the game crashes while enjoying Hello Kitty's Island Adventure, this is where you talk about that.”
“Hello Kitty's Island Adventure?”
“Whatever steamer you're working this week.”
“Splinter Cell.”
“Oh snap. Tom Clancy. Nice.”
“It's not Jack Ryan.”
“Right,” Glasses cleared his throat. “Now, we have a name for our bug and a description, but we need to know how often it happens. That's your repro rate. Reproduction. Without the fluids. The number of times you go through the steps and the bug occurs. If it happens all the time, that's five out of five. If it happens some of the time, three out of five, etc. We want to know how often someone actually manages to enjoy Hello Kitty's Island Adventure.”
“Hello Kitty is British, you know.”
“Right, onto the repro steps. These are real important. These are the things you have to do to make the bug happen. Sometimes it's simple, like ‘Select start game.’ Other times, it's complicated, like ‘Select start game with controller four while unplugging controllers one and three. A good tester can provide steps to hit a bug five out of five times with the least steps possible. It needs to be as simple as it can be while still true.”
“Makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“No.”
“The least amount of steps involves the least amount of noise. Less steps, less functions called, less junk in memory, less headache to diagnose for the developer. You don't want to give those guys headaches. They live there.”
“Their heads?”
“Yes,” Glasses confirmed. “Which is why we also record with VCRs. You know what those are right?”
“No, I have the internet.”
“Well, developers sometimes simply will not believe anyone is enjoying Hello Kitty's Island Adventure. They are motivated entirely by empirical evidence and deductive reasoning. Particularly if the repro rate isn't one hundred percent, the steamer's ship date is soon, and their producer is screaming at them in several Hindi languages. So, we include recordings of the bug happening. Proof it exists no matter how vocal or scientific someone gets. They have to deal with it. Can't blame a sunspot.”
“Seems cruel.”
“Oh,” Glasses grinned the wicked grin of a veteran test engineer. “It is.”
“I thought we weren't supposed to give them headaches.”
“Exceptions apply.”
“Like the idea all truth is relative?”
“I don't follow.”
“The statement ‘all truth is relative’ is itself an attempt at an objective truth statement. It's ironic and self-defeating.”
“Great. A philosopher. No one cares about that because we include our actual and expected results in the bug report, too. So, if our actual result for this bug is ‘Player enjoying Hello Kitty's Island Adventure crashes,’ the expected result would be ‘Player does not crash, whether enjoying the game somehow or not.’ Dig?”
“No.”
“Okay, you know how all the Presidential polls in 2016 projected a win for Clinton?”
“It's 2002.”
“And,” Glasses continued. “How a blimp from a reality television show won instead?
“What's reality television?”
“A form of public torture. One of the executioners from a show wins election in 2016.”
“No one will believe that.”
“That's why we keep the VCRs recording.”
“They still won't believe it.”
“But you’ll still get paid, and a thief will still rule them all. Whether they come to terms with the truth isn’t your problem. The next steps are up to them.”
I think I should read from the beginning.
This is definitely brain food.