A software tester walks into a bar and orders a beer. They order 0 beers. They order 99999999 beers. They order asdfff beers. They order -1 beers for everyone in the house. The dogs playing poker each order a beer.
It’s called edge cases. Sometimes we try them deliberately. Often, our staff runs into them while testing other things in the new accounting software.
For example, we started with a brand new bank account to test a recent bug fix. Adding one transaction worked OK, but clicking the previous and next buttons gave weird errors. Those have no place to go, so it needed some code to disable them. Adding a second transaction worked OK, but when we came back later it gave an even weirder error, and eventually crashed. Fixing that solved a long-term bug in the way we load the most recently-used item. More code we forgot to add.
Many of the problems are in the screen interface, which is entirely new. The worst are in the links between the screen fields and accounting records. Those can cause all sorts of scary messages, plus corrupted data.
Sadly, I think it will be a few months until there’s a version we aren’t ashamed to release. Too many serious bugs are still turning up.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
