The Becky Special

Becky has worked at the company for several years as a Senior Software Tester. She occasionally does stupid things so I’ve written a few blogs about her. To be honest, she isn’t that bad when it comes to manual testing, but she isn’t technical at all; which then leads to funny mishaps.

I think she does try hard to get involved, but often has a hard time grasping even simple concepts. She seems to forget things too. There’s a few occasions where she has asked a question and stated “I’ve never come across this before”. Yet, if I search Slack, I can find the last time she asked it 3-6 months ago.

Here’s a collection of smaller stories that weren’t interesting for a full-length blog.

Interruptions

One thing that Becky likes doing is acting like she agrees with people. She often does it in an incredibly rude way.

For example, Mick was giving a detailed explanation, and while he was talking, Becky was like “yeah… yeah… yeah, yeah… yeah”. What made it even more funny is when Mick finally finished, she went “ooooh” as if she was surprised.

On a casual/non-work chat, James was informing the team on Best By vs Use By dates shown on food.

James: “Best before means..“

Becky (loudly): “Yeah! Yeah!“

Then, because James got interrupted, someone else diverted the conversation. I knew roughly what he was going to say, but other people on the call may not have, and could have found it really interesting.

I get really frustrated when I am trying to explain how to recreate a bug, or the impact of it – so she really needs to understand in order to do her job – and she is talking over me with her “yeah, yeah, yeahs”. I don’t believe she can take the information in when she is constantly saying “yeah” while you are still talking.

Profiler

Becky found a client-side issue and I was trying to investigate the code to try to understand what was happening. After a while, Becky comes up with an idea:

Becky: “shall we use the profiler?“

Me: “what sort of profiler?“

Becky: “oh, I dunno! I was thinking SQL Profiler“

Me: “It’s nothing to do with SQL“

Becky: “ah right, yeah“

I was really perplexed when she suggested using a profiler. I thought she was going to suggest something amazing like an advanced debugging tool, but no, she was just saying some words and hoping for the best.

Wrong Server

“Some help if possible…I cannot connect to the Application server within SQL Management Studio, but I can remote to it with no problem. I can however connect to the Database Server using my windows login through SQL Management Studio. Does the App server require admin credentials? TIA”
Becky

No, it doesn’t need special credentials, the problem is that Application servers don’t contain databases. A Database Server can be connected through SQL Management because it has databases. It’s in the name, really.

Any server can be connected using Remote Desktop Connection. SQL Management Studio requires Databases.

Criticising Becky

I’ve had a few calls with different colleagues recently, and instead of giving me a standard greeting and then start discussing the topic at hand…they start the conversation with a rant about Becky.

They have been helping her prior to my call. Their statements have been similar to “god, she is such hard work”, and “I have repeatedly told her what to do, but she didn’t understand – so I ended up doing it myself.”

There was one exact quote I wrote down. I thought it was hilarious.

“It’s difficult to come to terms with how useless she really is”

The Fabulous Holiday

Becky: “did you enjoy your holiday yesterday?“

Alison: “Actually, it was sick leave“

Becky: “Fabulous“

I was convinced that Becky didn’t listen to her response.

Are You Aware?

Becky added me to a group chat with a few people. She asked

“Are you aware of this issue?”

There was no previous context, and the chat didn’t have a title, so all I had to go on was her question.

I respond with a “shrug” emoji because I have literally no idea what she is referring to. After a few minutes, she hadn’t responded, so I thought I’d make it clear just in case she didn’t come to the realisation that she hadn’t sent a bug number or description. So I said

“I assume you are referring to a recent meeting you assume I was in, or have added me to a group conversation and assumed I can see the previous chat history”

So she responds

“Sorry, I thought you were aware”

I facepalm, then headbutt the desk.

Box Ticking

When we have a version of our software to release, the “patches” get stored on a server. However, the server was full which was preventing the new release from being created. This was scheduled to be signed off that evening, ready to be pushed to production tomorrow. We have a tool that can view the list of patches, and you can easily delete old versions you don’t care about. Just tick the checkboxes and click the “deprecate” button.

A few hours after I was aware of the issue, a Manager requested help. We point out that someone just needs to tick some boxes and click a button. He then posts an angry response.

“If all that needs to happen is ticking a box and clicking “deprecate”, I’m really struggling to understand why we’ve been totally blocked since this morning? 7 hours of time was absolutely wasted. Now I have to go and somehow explain this to the Senior Management why we are not signing off tomorrow!?
Angry Manager

I see this as a rhetorical statement, because obviously, he is really angry. However, Becky chimes in with:

“you have to make sure you tick the correct boxes.”
Becky

I was in tears. Absolute hilarity.

Requesting Help – But Not Providing Enough Info

Becky is a Software Tester with maybe 15 years testing experience, so you think she’d know what she is doing.

When I was a Tester, I quickly learned what the developers wanted in order to help you. The Message and Stack Trace is mandatory if the software crashed, but it’s always great if you can explain what you were trying to do to “set the scene”:

What you expected to happen,
and what actually happened.

Then, if possible, state specific steps to consistently recreate the issue. This is what Developers need to fix a bug, but the same information is great if you want help after failing to configure a server/feature etc.

In this situation, Becky had what sounded like a straight-forward task, and under normal circumstances, you could just log in to the software, fill in a few fields and click save.

She posts on Slack for help, and states she thought this task would be simple but it’s “not the case”. Then says with “Alan’s help, I’ve changed a config file”, and she was trying to use a configuration program but was “unable to connect”.

I’m reading her message and thinking “why has she changed this config file?”, and “what has the connection error got to do with anything else she said in the message?”. She should be able to do all this using our software.

So I message Alan to translate what she said. He did explain it wasn’t that simple, and so they were doing this configuration an alternative way. He said the current problem was just connecting to the server, and he had told her to log a ticket with the Networks team. He said after that, he would carry on helping her.

So I reply to her message on Slack, stating that Alan is still helping her.

She then says that she “knows there is knowledge within the team and didn’t want to take up any more of Alan’s time”.

I thought she was just wasting other people’s time by trying to get other people unnecessarily involved. Alan had helped until this blocking issue occurred; which Becky needed to get the Network’s team to sort out. There’s no point wasting other people’s time.

Since I had already invested some time into it, I decided to ask her some questions. I wanted to know the IP address of the server she was having trouble with, the IP address of the system she was initially configuring, and a database ID so I could actually see if she had the data in the correct tables.

She only answered 1 of my questions, and her response was a slight rephrasing of the thing I questioned. So she wants help, but won’t give me the info in order to actually help. At no point did she say that Alan had instructed her to log a ticket, so she wasn’t even following what Alan told her.

I find that there are a lot of Software Testers that fail to give you enough information to do your job. Somehow they think you can magically work out what they intended to do, and work out what the problem is with barely any information.

Report API fail

A tester says they are running a Test Case where they need to generate a report using our software. This report utilises a third-party service. The report fails to generate.

There should be errors displayed when you view the details, but it’s completely blank. So if they have correct data, then it’s a bug because it doesn’t work. If they don’t have correct data, then it’s a bug because it doesn’t tell the user what the problem is. It’s a bug either way.

Becky, a Senior tester:

Asks him if he has the correct data. Completely misses the point.
Then she posts a follow-up question asking him if he has gone directly to the third-party website to get the information. Completely misses the point.

No, Becky, the functionality is that our software contacts the third party API to retrieve this information. Manually going to the website and filling a form out by hand isn’t helpful, or acceptable. It isn’t going to make the test case pass is it?

“ok, we will pass the test because the website works. Nothing to worry about.”
Becky’s mind

Sometimes I think she tries to be dumb on purpose.

August Retrospective

As part of “Agile Development”, you have a meeting called a Retrospective where you look back on things that have happened over a certain time period (like two weeks), and say what happened, what went well, and what didn’t go well.

When we worked in an office, we booked out a meeting room and wrote on Post-It notes and placed them on a whiteboard. Since we are working from home now, we needed an online solution. We used the Retrospective board on Microsoft’s Azure Devops; which worked well.

There were a few interesting points I wanted to note down. One point I strongly agreed with, and the other two points I think either: I am deluded, or the rest of the team are.

“Part time Product Owner”. When our team was formed, we were told our product is really important. If it was important, we would have the correct staff in place, with a Product Owner in charge of providing us with requirements, or making decisions on well-defined requirements. At first, we didn’t have a Product Owner. Then later, we got one, but she was split between two products and we were always low priority. Due to this, some of my work ended up being shelved because I had implemented the requirements I knew about, but I knew there was much more to it, so raised questions that were never answered.

“Need to stop working at pace, otherwise we will all burn out.” This is absolute nonsense; we are so slow. This is basically a reference to what the Head Of Development said in Team Summary, but other managers have used the phrasing “working at pace”, so now people in the team are regurgitating it.

“Code Analysis work going fast” First of all, the people responsible for analysing the data were dragging it out as long as possible, see The Code Analysis Meetings (It’s a great read [if I’m allowed to promote my own blog]). Also, Colin has been leading a small team to actually fix these “problems”.
A) they are making changes manually and progress is slow. The changes are simple, and they can get Visual Studio to fix them without extra input.

B) Colin was taking days to review them, so I ended up stepping in and reviewing the code for him.

Bonus Chuckle

We get to the end of the retro, having gone through the full board. The final stage is to vote on the items that are suggestions on what to “do”/”stop doing” in future.

“I can’t see my items on here”
Becky

It turns out she has added her items to another team’s board. 🤦

I don’t get how we can go through the ENTIRE board and only then does she realise that we haven’t talked about the four items that she added.

O365 Integration

“Is it possible to get a few of us together to look at what areas of our software would be hit by Office 365? Another team is testing the integration and needs our assistance on the affected areas.”
Becky

In our software, we already integrate with Microsoft Word, but it relies on it being installed on that user’s computer. This request from Becky seemed like a random request, and there’s definitely a lot more information she needs to provide here.

So I asked “Have there been changes to our software to handle this? I don’t really get what this means. Instead of loading the locally-installed Word, is it going to launch a browser with Word in it? Does this include other aspects like Outlook, Excel etc”.

There’s loads of features of Office 365, do they want Outlook, Teams, Excel, Powerpoint or more to work? It simply isn’t going to work without us adding compatibility for it. Interacting with a Web Application (Word running inside a browser like Microsoft Edge) is completely different to interacting with a Desktop Application (Word running as a standalone software). The former will need to call an API/Web-Service, the latter is interacting with DLL files on the computer.

It turns out it was just the desktop Word application you can install via your O365 subscription. So it wasn’t really anything to do with O365 really. I found out because she eventually forwarded me an email. It had literally everything someone would need to answer her original question, it’s just that she didn’t bother sharing it.

Additionally, the other team already had a list of affected areas, and what she really wanted to know if there were any other aspects they didn’t consider.

So why did she ask such a vague question, and why suggest we would be doing the analysis from scratch?

What a waste of time. Absolutely infuriating. How many blogs am I writing about her poor communication?

User has been deleted!

In previous blogs, I’ve told a few stories about how bad a software tester, Becky, is at communicating. Sometimes, it seems like she is trolling. Here is another story:

“My user has been deleted when I clicked the refresh button, how do I undo?”.
Becky

Well, I think you should have panicked and logged a high priority bug if that was the case.

There’s obviously more to this than she is stating. Your user doesn’t mysteriously vanish by clicking a button which says something other than “Delete”. What makes her think she can undo this action? Why does she think this is normal?

I replied, asking her for more information: What was she trying to do? What does she remember clicking before it happened?

Becky ignores my requests and directs her messages to a select few software testers.

What are the testers going to do? If there’s a serious bug, it needs to go to a developer to investigate, and promptly!

Why was she ignorant of my attempt to help? It made me think if she doubted what she was writing, and deep-down; she knew her user hadn’t been deleted afterall.

I decided to play around with the software and click some random buttons, but I noticed something peculiar pretty quickly.

It turns out there was a bug in the displayed list of users. Her user existed, it just didn’t show it unless you selected a different filter button; then reselect the initial filter.

She didn’t bother logging a bug. It’s literally her job as a software tester.

Just Copying What Was Already There

My manager calls me and says there is a bug that might end up holding the release, and wondered if I can help. He said it was found when testing Colin’s work, but it might not actually be related to his changes.

Colin had been given some other work and he was taking ages on it,so wasn’t available to complete this work himself.

So I call Colin and ask him what this bug is. He sent me the description from the tester (Becky) which was next to useless, he showed me his recent changes, and a specification from his project. Colin assured me that his changes should work, because he just “copied what was already there”.

It seemed like everything I needed, so I got digging into the code and testing it out.

It didn’t take me long before I realised what Colin had done. There were two scenarios that he needed to check. By copying and pasting what he saw in that file; he was just covering one of the scenarios. The other scenario was actually in another file, and he would have realised that if he actually tested it.

The thing is, my first thought was to add a unit test to cover the scenario. I checked for existing unit tests for that file, and there were some existing tests. Colin hadn’t bothered adding additional unit tests; which would have made him realise that his changes didn’t cover both scenarios.

Then days have gone by, the manual testers have finally got round to testing out his changes, and logged this issue just days before the release.

Then I have to save the day once more.

It’s so annoying/stressful when you get given a bug to fix with strict deadlines, but luckily it was very easy to fix. If Colin had shown a bit of effort, then we wouldn’t have been in that situation.

I Agree

There’s one guy in my team that always wants to portray himself positively. So he loves talking, and, in my opinion, he basically keeps taking credit for other people’s ideas; or at least wants people to think he had some contribution to them.

So here are some clichéd phrases that he reels off in every meeting:

When someone says something good:

“I was just about to say that”
“I agree with that”
“I was just thinking that”

If he thinks someone knows more than him:

“We need to touch base”
“We need to arrange a catch-up so we are on the same page”

If he says something stupid:

“I’m only asking the question for everyone’s benefit”
“I just wanted to call it out so the decision is documented”

Becky did a similar thing the other day:

Becky: “a menu option disappears until you log out and back in again. Do you think that is a feature?”

Sean: “Sounds like a bug”

Becky: “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking”

Sean: “If we introduced it, this will need to be fixed before the release goes out”

Becky: “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking”

No, you were thinking it was a feature like an idiot.

It turns out she was just logging in with a different user profile. So the feature wasn’t there to begin with on the first profile.

It annoys me when people just pretend to agree. If you don’t understand something, then someone needs to explain it to you more. In the first example, he does ask questions to get the information, but he also claims he agrees in an unreasonable number of situations. If someone comes up with an awesome idea, let them have their moment of glory rather than using phrases like “I was just about to say that”; because that devalues their contribution.

The IP

Becky: “I can’t contact my machine.”

Shows a screenshot…

initially pinging her machine by IP address; it is responding.
She tries to remote on using the machine name, and not the full address; Didn’t work.
Then she tries by IP, but it’s a completely different IP to what she was pinging; Didn’t work.

I reply “You are using the wrong IP”

A couple of hours later, she replies: “Nevermind I went into the office to restart it”…even though we are supposed to stay at home and not go to the office.