The Silent QA Detective
Finding Bugs in Plain Sight
Throughout this month, I am concentrating on QA Stories, highlighting remarkable events from various companies I've worked with. This week, I'm reminded of a reserved QA engineer whom we'll call Steve. He was exceptional at his job - uncovering even the most stubborn bugs. His ability to pinpoint the trickiest problems in web applications made him legendary among developers, despite his perpetually low-key demeanor. Here are a few stories from Steve's bug-hunting escapades that are still circulated within the Dev communities.
The Phantom Dropdown Issue
Steve's first victory was what developers called the "Phantom Dropdown Issue." It was a classic case of "it works on my machine" that had stumped everyone for weeks. The dropdown worked perfectly in all environments except for a few random occurrences on production. Most of the team chalked it up to user error, assuming that the customers must have been doing something wrong.
Steve, however, decided to dig deeper. He observed that the bug occurred only during very specific conditions- when a user with a regional setting of "en-UK" tried to access the dropdown on a Monday morning. It turned out that the JavaScript controlling the dropdown couldn't handle a particular time parsing during this transition. Steve quietly filed the bug report, detailing the obscure conditions that caused it. Developers were stunned - how had he even thought to test that?
When asked how he found it, he shrugged and said, "I just listen to WRKO for the talk, so I had time to think." That left everyone scratching their heads. How Steve's radio habits connected to the bug was beyond them, but they knew better than to question the man who could find a needle in a haystack.
The One-Pixel Invisible Button
Another time, Steve uncovered what the team later dubbed "The One-Pixel Invisible Button" issue. Users reported that their session would randomly refresh, losing all their progress. As usual, no one could reproduce it. Frustration was high, and Steve, as always, remained calm.
One afternoon, he took his laptop, sat in the break room, and pulled up the site. A few minutes later, he came back to the team, holding a stack of printed screenshots with highlighted regions. The culprit? A single, misplaced invisible button- just one pixel wide- hidden within the footer.
Apparently, whenever a user's mouse hovered over that pixel while scrolling, it triggered a refresh event. Steve discovered that it only affected users on certain screen resolutions - an anomaly that most testers would have ignored. He summed it up with his characteristic nonchalance: "Think outside the box, but don't forget to close the box once you're done."
The Mysterious Cache Flaw
Then there was the time he identified a cache issue that occurred only during high-traffic events. Users would get logged out unexpectedly, right during peak periods such as quarter end. The developers went back and forth with the server logs but couldn't pinpoint the root cause.
Steve, though, noticed a pattern. It only happened when users were refreshing their pages at precisely midnight. Most saw it as a coincidence, but Steve wasn't one for coincidences. He discovered that the session cookie's expiration time overlapped with a server-side cache refresh cycle, which triggered unexpected logouts. It was such a specific edge case that the fix involved changing a single line of code, but it saved the team's reputation.
When asked how he managed to spot the issue, Steve just said, "Don't assume, verify." Again, no one understood how that was relevant, but they were just relieved he found the problem.
Conclusion: The Value of Quiet Observation
Steve's bug-hunting prowess became the stuff of legend, not because he was loud or boisterous, but because he knew how to pay attention to the little details. While others might focus on the obvious, he had an uncanny ability to consider the strange and unexpected scenarios that others dismissed. To Steve, finding bugs was like slowly chiseling away at Stone Mountain with a hand tool- meticulous, precise, and never rushed.
He never sought the spotlight, but in the world of QA, the results spoke for themselves. Developers might have laughed at his quirky remarks or puzzled over his non-sequiturs, but they also knew one thing for sure: if there was a bug hiding somewhere in the code, Steve would find it.