A little story about testing computer systems
I read and post daily on the VNBoards. The past few days there was a thread talking about paying to play a beta. In all the muck of posts I found this little gem.
Reminds me of a story - Years ago I worked on a test system for the products the company I was working for made. The system was robotically controlled and collected results to be put in a database. The operator had to fill in a few fields of the database. Well, after a few weeks we couldn't figure out why there were hundreds of blank records in the database. We spent time watching what the operator was doing and we found the problem. There was a prompt on the screen that said, "Press Enter To continue". Well, when they pressed enter, it brought up another form for them to fill out (the next batch). Since the prompt never said "RELEASE" enter, she would just hold it down and it would fill in all blanks and go to another record (this will continue till they filled up the keyboard buffer). We NEVER thought someone would take the prompts so litterally, we were much more careful in the future (and we fixed that one).
