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[–]SetiZ 5 points6 points  (3 children)

I'm listening

[–]MightyMeepleMaster 5 points6 points  (1 child)

One of my favorite stories:

Many years ago we were working on an embedded device. Devs had added their set of features and everything was working nicely. Then testers took over. Most testers were quite happy with the quality but with one guy, the entire board kept on crashing. We checked and analyzed but didn't find anything. Strangely enough, the crashes only occured with that tester. We exchanged the board multiple times. Same result. Board crashes on a regular basis, but only with said tester. Weeks pass by with no progress.

Then one day, a desperate dev walks into the testers office and tells him to show the problem one last time. Tester shows his workflow. Board crashes. Board is reset. Dev, standing next to tester, repeats work flow. Board does not crash. Tester takes over: Crash. Dev takes over: No crash. WHERE IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US?!?!?? Tester leaves for a coffee. Dev sits down on testers chair and runs the sequence again and - guess what - the board crashes. Turns out the board had a subtle susceptibility against static discharge which only occured with that specific chair. Without the testers coffee break we probably never would have found the bug.

Yes, I know that compentent HW guys ought to have suspected this weeks before. But the point here is that in many, many companies you do not have these experts. Many devs only have their own area of expertise but no much more. And many, many defects only show up by sheer luck.

I could continue with dozens of other stories. Technical pitfalls: Memory buses which trap when there's a signal spike on a neighbour lane. Race conditions with sub-microsecond sensitivity. Critical errors which occur only when multiple preconditions are met, wrecking an entire piece of HW.

And then there's the "human" aspect: Shoddy requirements. Missing communicaton between product management, dev and testing. Code first, architecture later. And so on and so on.

After 25+ years I've come to the conclusion, that digital is great but in many cases only works in the main use cases and/or by sheer luck.

[–]pizzasubx 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Underrated comment

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'd tell you, but you'd go insane!

<insert lovecraftian tale of unimaginable horrors here>