As an end user, it is easy to miss bugs, or to shrug bugs off as a mysterious anomaly of the software. For the past several months, I’ve noticed that when I am reading mail in Outlook’s three-pain view, grouped by From, if I drag/drop a group of messages to another folder, I appear to remain in the Inbox folder but it appears empty and I have to sort of click around randomly to get the inbox contents to reappear. (I think it’s basically to click on another folder and then return to the Inbox.)
(Really, all that description wasn’t necessary, but I can’t help making my bug report descriptive.)
It’s one of those terrible “intermittent problems”–not happening every time, but enough to be annoying (yet not annoying enough to open a support ticket – and I don’t even know how to do that, with MSFT, with our internal IT people)?
This is easy to do while testing too. The combination of “not terribly annoying”, “not terribly consistent”, and “easy, instinctive workaround to get back to the thing that I really want to test.” Especially if you are working from a pre-defined test script. (In theory, Exploratory Testers are less likely to ignore this problem.) These are particularly likely bugs to escape from development as well, because the developer’s tests are unlikely to ever hit them – or he’s likely to ignore them because he knows the easy workaround instinctively.
It’s important to deliberately turn on the “tester brain” while testing because our “end user” brain is much more tolerant of poor quality.
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