Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Beta testing
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Bug hunting is the process of systematically attempting to break the app. What if I drag this here - does anything happen? What if I type letters into this number field? What if I switch Mac OS to the Graphite scheme? What if my phone is set to mute? What if the Internet connection is lost in mid-operation? To the right sort of person, this is like a puzzle game - they love it. Because they’ve broken many apps before, they have the ability to make their minds the opposite of the developers’, asking the question what did they not think of?
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A friend of a friend asked me to be a beta tester for a game he was making. I played the game a couple of time to make sure it worked as expected. Then I tried to break it. I mashed the keyboard. I tried every combination of command/control/letter/number key I could think of. I did it all again while clicking randomly with the mouse. I went through and deleted the non-.exe files one by one to see what kind of crash would result.
In the end, I had a long list of bugs: the game would turn into a wireframe if I did this key combo, it would halt and stutter if if did this other combo, it would crash catastrophically if I deleted this file instead of failing gracefully, etc. etc.
The programmer was really annoyed when I presented my list. He was all “Nobody’s gonna do any of those things!” He had wanted me to find out which strategies worked and didn’t work in the game, and to find out what was fun and not so fun.
When he wrote his next game, he again asked me to beta test it. But this time, he gave me explicit instructions not to test it the way I did last time. I ended up not having much to report: when you did what was expected, it played as you would expect it to.
He never asked me to be a beta tester after that.
