Tuesday 11 May 2010

I found a bug (but one I wasn't meant to find)

The biggest issue with being a tester is that it is habit forming. After a while you find yourself looking for bugs and when things do fail you find yourself trying to recreate them so you can narrow down the exact set of circumstances that cause the bug.

I have found a bug on my blackberry.

My phone has this cool feature called bedside mode, in this mode all the radios are turned off making it impossible for calls,email,sms etc to ruin a good nights sleep. The phone also has a feature that turns off the radios when battery power gets too low. Once the phone is being charged the radios will be turned on automatically.

The above two functions work well in isolation but when they are tested together there is a bug. Here is my bug report:
Abstract: battery charging causes phone to turn radio on even in bedside mode

Description:
1)Let battery drain so radios are powered off automatically
2)Plug phone into mains
3)turn bedside mode on
4)Once battery power becomes normal the radios will turn on again (even though bedside mode is on) and your sleep is disturbed by incoming messages.

So what do I do now. If this was a project that I was testing then there would be a well defined process for me to raise this issue with the development team. But I am just a customer. I had a search on RIM's website and couldn't see a way to raise a defect or even contact the support team.

Sunday 2 May 2010

Hobbit @ Impact

Hello and welcome from IBM Impact 2010. I have made it to the venetian hotel in one piece (although my suitcase got damaged and will need replacing - oh well)

Just spoke to a CICS customer. He had just registered and found us sat around the table. We spoke and over that brief conversation we discussed his environment and pain points and we offered CICS function that could help him such as the CICS explorer.

Although impact offers fantastic sessions with great speakers I often think that it is these small interactions that weren't scheduled or forced but just two technical people, one with problems the other with indepth product knowledge is where the real magic happens. I hope that the customer has gone away with a few ideas that he can think about during the week. When he gets back to his day job he can try them out and see what works and what doesn't.

This is why Impact is such a great event. Customers have access to whole teams of people from IBM who aren't just the sales teams but the engineers who design/build/test the software that they use. We are techies but we want to understand they issues you may have, the experiences you have and offer our insight and support where we can.

If you are at impact please don't hesitate to grab a speaker or IBMr and talking to them. If they don't know the answer to your question I'm sure they can find the right person who will.