There's testers and there's... testers



  • Reading up on some older WTF's sent me back into memory lane about a WTF tester I once had the honor of working with at my previous company.

    A colleague and I were working on a Delphi application, and we were located on the ground floor of the building. We had a tester assigned to us, and he was working on the first floor (I believe that's called second floor by some non-Dutch countries :-) ).

    Now normally I was used to good quality testers in our company: they were (and still are) a leader in professional testing services. But this guy was something else. He would come back to us with the most insane "bugs" that were simply his disagreement in the way the Windows OS UI works, like not liking to use the keyboard mapping used in the Windows Explorer (yes, he had difficulty discerning between our application and the OS) or not liking the placement of the minimize button. Now normally this would be good for a laugh, but we ended up walking over to his PC 50 times a day to clear up what the hell he was talking about.

    Maybe one of the best illustrations of his... um... cognitively challenged mind was when he reported an error in the calendar widget. Since that was a standard OCX control in Delphi and we had used that in many applications my colleague and I had a moment of blinking at each other in surprise. This would be probably be good, so we both went up with him to see what was wrong.

    "See, I click on the date thingy here, and the calendar widget comes up.". (And so it did, one of those controls showing the month and year and a matrix with the days of the month and arrows to change the month). "So I choose the day...". (He clicked the day and then clicked the right arrow, advancing the calendar one month forward). "Then I choose the month...". (Funny that he didn't notice months 13 to 30 as an error... He clicks a day and presses the right arrow again, advancing the month once more). "So where's the years?", he said sitting back with a smug expression. Fearing my colleague would start strangling the tester I sent him away and proceeded to explain how a calendar control works. Took me no more than 15 minutes, not too bad...

    We tried to get a replacement tester, but we were told that as experienced programmers we were to help him out a little since he was a bit new to testing. Working without a tester also was not an acceptable option...

    In the end we decided to secretly install VNC on his machine ("my password is secret, ha ha, get it?") so we wouldn't have to walk upstairs all the time. (No, he never noticed the tray icon). That improved things a lot and got us some laughs, which made the situation bearable, like the times we freaked him out over the phone when we'd say things like: "No! Not that button! Press the one on the right!"



  •  TRTWF is that those non-Dutch countries have no concept of a 'ground level' (begane grond) floor :)



  • @keigezellig said:

     TRTWF is that those non-Dutch countries have no concept of a 'ground level' (begane grond) floor :)

    Oh no, let's not start a discussion about 0 indexing *again*.




  • @Evo said:

    Oh no, let's not start a discussion about 0 indexing *again*.
     

    Or -1 indexing. I just stayed in an apartment on the "3rd" floor in Barcelona that would be the 5th in the US: the street level of the building was shops, so you go up a flight of stairs to the "main" floor, then up another flight to the "first"..



  • At least the guy was testing something in your application. I once worked in a project where the first tester sent us a humongous report full of bugs, most of which consisted of missing features. The guy was actually testing ANOTHER application. And it took ten minutes for him to understand that when we went explaining, and he kept telling us that the two applications should be the same thing.



  • @keigezellig said:

     TRTWF is that those non-Dutch countries have no concept of a 'ground level' (begane grond) floor :)

    Actually, it depends on what building you look at. True, many of them have the second floor directly above the lobby, but I once worked in a building that had a lobby, a mezzanine, a facilities level (exercise area, etc.), and then floors 1 through 3.



  • @barfoo said:

    Or -1 indexing. I just stayed in an apartment on the "3rd" floor in Barcelona that would be the 5th in the US: the street level of the building was shops, so you go up a flight of stairs to the "main" floor, then up another flight to the "first".
    The building I live in has cellar, high ground floor and then floors 1 and 2. The high ground floor is called that way because it's half a floor above the ground (you could say that the cellar is -0,5, the high ground floor is 0,5 and floor 1 is 1,5).



  •  Hey... I worked on the 1st floor at Windsor Station in Montreal. Below me however, were A, B, C(oncourse), and finally G(round).



  • @servman said:

     Hey... I worked on the 1st floor at Windsor Station in Montreal. Below me however, were A, B, C(oncourse), and finally G(round).

     

     

    Yeah, so what? 



  • @Evo said:

    @keigezellig said:

     TRTWF is that those non-Dutch countries have no concept of a 'ground level' (begane grond) floor :)

    Oh no, let's not start a discussion about 0 indexing *again*.


    I'm laughing at this moment, as I actually used a building example in the 0-indexing thread! Anyway, buildings are (normally) slated with the ground-level floor as either G, L, or something like that (in Spanish PB is used, for "Planta Baja"). However, hilarity ensues on buildings with letter-labeled levels, or those on irregular terrain having more than one "ground levels". One hotel in acapulco has J (beach level, hell knows what that J stands for), T (Terraza), I (no one knows what this means either), R (Recepcion, the "Lobby" and the actual "street ground level"), C (Commercial? This one isn't even accessible by elevator!) ... followed by your standard 6,7,8,9 floors. They gave the "J" level the number one ... but if you look at the beach layout, the beach itself is still one level lower, but not accessible by elevator. the "J" level only had access to the pool, and the stairway leading to the actual beach.

    And some office buildings actually have labeled their ground floors as "0"... oh the fun...



  • @danixdefcon5 said:

    @Evo said:

    Oh no, let's not start a discussion about 0 indexing *again*.

    And some office buildings actually have labeled their ground floors as "0"... oh the fun...

     

    My desk at work (in UK) is on floor '0G'. Upstairs is 01, 02, 03, ... I guess 00 would have be too confusing. On the plus side, I'm in a weightless environment and don't need to diet.



  •  The building where most of my courses take place also has a 0th level (ground floor. You get used to it.

    More problematic, however, is another building, which is split-level for no good reason. Level 1 (north) and level 1 (south) are only connected via the stairwell they share. People visiting the building for the first time are invariably confused - especially as professors have a habit of not stating which part of the building their course will take place in. I mean, the room number should tell you anything, right?

    It's still better than the one where they have a web interface intead of light switches, but that's too far off topic for this thread.



  • @j6cubic said:

    It's still better than the one where they have a web interface intead of light switches, but that's too far off topic for this thread.
    So start a new thread - it sounds worthy of one.



  • @j6cubic said:

    More problematic, however, is another building, which is split-level for no good reason. Level 1 (north) and level 1 (south) are only connected via the stairwell they share. People visiting the building for the first time are invariably confused - especially as professors have a habit of not stating which part of the building their course will take place in. I mean, the room number should tell you anything, right?
    There is a building similar to that at my previous school.  The building had additions on either end, but for some reason, the designer decided that the height of the ceilings for the new part should be higher than the original.  So, the first floor is on level, but the second floor and above has to have ramps between the new and old parts. Towards the top of the building, what is the 4th floor on the ends connects to the 5th floor of the old part... which is really confusing for freshmen students trying to find classes.



  • @WeatherGod said:

    @j6cubic said:

    More problematic, however, is another building, which is split-level for no good reason. Level 1 (north) and level 1 (south) are only connected via the stairwell they share. People visiting the building for the first time are invariably confused - especially as professors have a habit of not stating which part of the building their course will take place in. I mean, the room number should tell you anything, right?
    There is a building similar to that at my previous school.  The building had additions on either end, but for some reason, the designer decided that the height of the ceilings for the new part should be higher than the original.  So, the first floor is on level, but the second floor and above has to have ramps between the new and old parts. Towards the top of the building, what is the 4th floor on the ends connects to the 5th floor of the old part... which is really confusing for freshmen students trying to find classes.

    My old campus (Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México) had a novel idea of connecting all buildings with each other; the only buildings not directly connected would be: Library, Administration 5, and the "Student Center".

    The fun thing about these buildings is that when Aulas 2 (Classrooms 2, literally) was built, not only was the terrain a little higher, but the architects decided to make all buildings from here with taller floors. So you'd have (kind of) level corridors from Administration 1, Aulas 1, Administration 2 ... and then from Administration 2 to Aulas 2, it would be a flight of stairs that were increasingly steeper according to the floor. Oh, and while the "Aulas" series of buildings had 4 floors each, "Administration" buildings 1 and 2 were only 3 floors high. So no direct route for 4th floor Aulas 1 and Aulas 2. All connections from Aulas 2 -> Administration 3 -> Aulas 3 were direct, as all of these buildings were consistent in floor height and ground level. (Ok, the cafeteria was only 2 floors high, but that was on the "right" side of the corridors.)

    Eventually someone thought it would be a good idea to re-build the Admin 2 - Aulas 2 connecting stairway into a full stairway, which brought even more confusion to newcomers: walking from Admin 2, 3rd floor would level up to Aulas 2, 2nd floor. To actually get to the 3rd floor, you had to go UP. Not to mention that this particular link had heavy traffic, and the "fix" had cut the walkway width in half. So now we had an ugly congestion spot, and no way to skip around it short of going all the way down to ground floor; not an option if you were on the top floor. Yipes!



  • @danixdefcon5 said:

    [stairways]

     

    1. Didn't Escher make a picture or two of this building?

    2. I think I've had bad dreams involving buildings with such stairway layouts.


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