{"id":340,"date":"2011-09-07T21:15:22","date_gmt":"2011-09-08T04:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=340"},"modified":"2011-09-07T21:17:38","modified_gmt":"2011-09-08T04:17:38","slug":"numberz-winnerz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/numberz-winnerz\/","title":{"rendered":"Numberz Winnerz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks everyone who played the Numberz Challenge<\/a>. I\u2019ll get the boring part out of the way first. Based on response time and completeness (and bonus points for reverse engineering<\/a> the \u201cbad\u201d parts of the app), lixiong <\/strong>is the winner of either a signed copy of HWTSAM<\/a> or an Amazon gift certificate. Li \u2013 email me and we\u2019ll figure out the details of the exchange. A definite honorable mention goes to Aleksander Lipski \u2013 he came up with the same conclusions as Li, and also took the time to establish some context (which is easy to forget in contrived examples such as this). Aleksander \u2013 send me an email and we can work out some sort of prize for you too.<\/p>\n

Thanks to everyone else for playing along and testing the app. It was nice to see a high interest level in my silly little experiment.<\/p>\n

Analysis <\/h3>\n

For those interested in the what, why, and how of this exercise, read on.<\/p>\n

The Numberz App v1<\/h4>\n

Brent Jensen noted that the first<\/em> version of the application was quite buggy. It had several issues calculating the total. I released this buggy version on purpose. <\/em>I have a bit of a distaste for testing applications that are so buggy that finding bugs is like shooting fish in a barrel \u2013 bugs should be hard to find. <\/em><\/strong>I think the applications we use to learn testing should be (mostly) working applications with some seeded defects that are difficult to find. Once I save up enough money for another Amazon gift certificate, I\u2019ll see if I can come up with a more difficult exercise.<\/p>\n

A more important point I\u2019d like to bring up is that as testers, I hope we aren\u2019t seeing apps like this as part of our day jobs. Something as broken as the first drop of this app shouldn\u2019t make it one micrometer away from the hard drive of the developer who wrote it. If the apps and functionality you see on a daily basis is this bad, your software development process is broken (IMO of course, YMMV).<\/p>\n

Numberz v2 \u2013 the Bugs<\/h4>\n

You can dig the details out of the comments, but basically, Numberz had three notable bugs.<\/p>\n

The first bug was an intermittent addition error. Occasionally, the total would be one more than it should be. Some reports said that it seemed to happen about 2% of the time. Given the code, that sounds just about right. This gem was \u201chidden<\/a>\u201d in the source code.<\/p>\n

\n
    if<\/span> ((rand() % 50) == 0)<\/pre>\n
    {<\/pre>\n
        total+=1;<\/pre>\n
    }<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n