User inputs and App crash - hard to dealt with!

Input character sets are not impossible to define theoretically but in real world how many character set would we define to make test data is a question. With two recent issues in the real world makes it a common scenario that testing was done with limited number of sets.  

If an app is set to be used for a specific purpose or by specific group of people, it is little bit easier to define the guessable sets. When an app is open to use to the world, target audience is, to me, infinite (not theoretical infinite). It is pretty much unobtainable to go through different sets - symbols, group of symbol, symbols in specific sequence, combination of different symbols. Here I’m referring the symbols for letters and symbols. 

Little bit backtrack why I started to write this …. Within a week, I came to know two incidents – one with iPhone message app and another is skype app on windows. 

Skype is used for sending messages, which used to be their primary use at earlier time, now days like smart phone, skype has many other features. On the latest version of skype, if anyone sends a message with the characters “http://:” from a windows pc, it crashes skype and receiving a message with those characters make it crash as well. Then the option is to uninstall the skype and reinstall it. It MAY work as long as you did not have the history turned on at the time of sending/receiving message. If the history is on, skype will crash and will not run. There could be some other ways to handle it, but that surely is not desirable by the end user


Picture curtesy: http://venturebeat.com/ If you want you can read more in details from this link. 

Another similar thing happened recently with the iPhone message app. Someone received a text from a group message with some symbols/ letters (non-English) and when they open the message, the messenger app stopped working.  Users who receive a mysterious string of characters in a text are noticing their Messages app will consequently crash, and in some cases, the phone will automatically reboot, according to9to5.

Now, if we look into the Skype message again you will see there is a “:” after the http:// which makes it really unusual to type. User may accidently type it and this (can) happen.  Based on the probability it’s had much lower chances, but it happened. 

For the iPhone message, this is hard to understand any meaning of the symbols, all the Greek to me and it may be greek to the Greek people as well. Chances of such message may be <.00001% or even less. But it happened. 

There will be bugs and it may happen. I understand that as well. But the problem is, things like this is spreading on the internet. Some curious people are trying having some fun sending the text to other people. And as it crashes whoever is receiving this message making it a problem. 

Both of the companies are aware of this issue and most probably dealt with it already, from my point of view, how can I prevent it from happening. How can I predict such things so that it does not happen (or reduces the chance of happening) it the real world. This is an input for me and for the people working on my line. I might not have any exact way to deal with it now, but surely i'll try something different while testing considering these scenarios. 

Shopping mall, EAS system and my eBay app

Do you know what is a RF EAS system works or how it works? I don’t. All I can tell you what is stands for- Electronic Article Surveillance  that uses Radio-frequency. Still not sure what that thing is? :) It’s the thing that you may have seen at the checkout point/ exit point of a shopping mall. Those  big bars that detect whether anybody is passing through without paying for the product. Used as Anti-Shoplifting device. May be the following picture would help visualizing what i’m talking about.

Picture Courtesy: checkpointsystems.com

If you are interested how RF EAS system works- read this article from howthingsworks.com. They have explained the system including different variation of the system.

Ok, now we get a visual idea what i’m talking about. Why i’m talking about it? for that i need to share a story with you all.

I was in a shopping mall, walking around, passing the time while my better half was shopping. I was on my phone with ebay app. Browsing for some cell phone, using the buy it now option. I was walking around, going in and out, looking at the search results on ebay app. You people have seen people texting and walking and fall into fountain or in awkward situations. I was kind of like that. I was paying more attention to my ebay and less where i’m heading to. I nearly bumped into one of those EAS RF bars. I stopped. Still was looking at the screen. Then I saw the most interesting thing. All on a sudden something as added to my cart. I didn't even touch anything. I did not do anything and it was adding/ creating touch effect on my ebay app and adding item to my ebay cart! And, it did not stop there, it even tried to buy the thing. I was so lucky that I did not have the payment method setup on my cell phone. That saved me buying a $250 worth of cell phone that I did not wanted/ submitted.

First I would like to rule out the possible hacking issue. I was not connected to shopping mall wifi and my NFC settings was off. What actually happened, I don't know. All I know, when I was close to one of those bar (possibly the transmitter), it sent some electromagnetic wave (which I was kind of feeling it when I was moving the phone around the bar). I was near to the top portion of the bar. It did not happen at the lower level.

When it happened first time, I did not believe it. Then I tried few other times, it did the same thing. May be it is nothing abnormal to people who has enough knowledge about the whole system, to me, as a layman, all I saw it adding stuff to my cart and tried to buy it. It could be related to cell phone having the capacitive touch screen and that electromagnetic field generated the pulse to mimic the touch behavior.  

I tried few other thing, tried from the lock screen- nothing happened, tried from the home screen- nothing, went to app menu screen and then it started the facebook app. Could have tried few more things and was trying to take a video of this, ended up being questioned by the security guards.

I was wondering about whole thing. How would I ever test scenarios that may happen in real world. There are n number of user scenarios in real life. All I could do think about some of them and test my product. Testing is my passion, so I try to think and share about the events in my QA professional life. I dont want to be just a Tester but a real life Tester.