U-Turns

On the back of “Testing and Developer Equality”, Colin highlighted some minor problems in the code base and made a statement of “Any Tester should be comfortable picking up these items and writing code to fix it”.

One of the Testers spoke up and said “Not all Testers are comfortable, I for one have no interest in coding. Please don’t ask me to code”.

Then Colin quickly u-turned and said “I never said all Testers can code, but the ones that are interested in learning can pick these up”.

That’s not what you said Colin.

U-Turn #2

A Tester asked for help diagnosing an issue he found, and asked who could debug the problem on the Test Environment. Colin replied, and made a statement about having to install some debugging tools and how it’s going to be difficult because it’s a server-side problem.

Many developers have made comments in the past on how it’s basically impossible for us to debug server-side issues with our infrastructure (we can obviously run the client and server locally on our own computers, but sometimes problems are with specific data on the Test Environments). 

Recently, I tried it to see what the problem actually is, and it worked perfectly fine. No idea where this myth came from, but it’s been passed on for years. You don’t actually need to debug the actual server. You can run the server locally as long as it is the same version. You just need to point towards the Test Environment’s databases rather than your own.

So after Colin’s statement, I described my findings about debugging the server and data.

Colin then responded “I never said that you cannot debug the server”.

I knew he was talking nonsense. He was definitely implying you cannot debug the server. I also remember he said it a few weeks prior. I searched Slack for his post history and I found it. 

“If server side, then we have to try to recreate the issue in our own environment.”

Colin

I don’t get why people can’t just seem to admit they were wrong and be grateful for your information. I normally write something like “oops, I was mistaken” and then choose a funny emoji like 😖or 😜