Clearly the QA should have ordered a &#%@*
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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With a side of ‘); DROP TABLE Orders; —
Ah, yes. Little Bobby Tables
I don't think he's little anymore.
He goes by Bob Tables now
Even more real scenario: The first real visitor isn't even a customer but a bored teenager who says nothing at all and instead takes a piss on the floor. (Anyone who ever published anything on the internet knows this scenario.)
I think the customer tried to pass the wrong type. Happens to us all.
I once had a QA engineer file a bug saying they couldn't do negative testing since negative numbers were converted to positive.
The function took an unsigned integer. Took a lot of explaining to get them to understand that negative testing isn't necessarily negative numbers.
I'd argue that the system shouldn't automatically convert negative numbers to positive numbers. Instead, it should display an error to the user. Of course, that's an abstract thought as I don't know what was the system and who interacted with it.
For something end-user facing: I could understand this argument.
In this case they were more or less just calling a C function that had an unsigned long long as the parameter they were setting negative.
The whole 'bug' was that the other side of the function call was seeing a positive number no matter what.
The real situation was a bit more complicated, but that's the gist.
He asked for -1 beers. He got interpreted as 2^64^ - 1 beers (assuming 64-bit unsigned integers)
At one point I was hired as a developer by an IT Products company which was starting a new area using (at the time) more recent technologies and programming languages, but until the thing really started going they had no significant work for me to do so I did QA for a few months (mostly automating QA).
Let's just say that having a hacker mindset and a bit of a dastardly satisfaction in "cracking" the software is a big help in QA.
I suspect that I might have enjoyed the "managing to find a way to break somebody else's code" part of it a bit too much.
Customer ate Taco Bell before going to the bar.