Another motivating story- finding a bug that was crucial in time

Motivation is a driving force…

Motivation helps us to go forward…

……..

and I can go on and on like these quotes about motivation. The profession i’m on is one of the most less interesting job (to many people). They don’t find enough to interest to work in this line for a long period of time. For a short period of time, it can give more money than the other alternative jobs. So some people choose this line as a temporary job and then once they find their own line of job, they switch over to that line.

Motivating factors are different depending on each person's personality/ mentality. I was reading one article about motivation and found some interesting point about it. I do not know enough about the author Audrey Marlene, liked his point of view regarding this. She mentioned on her motivation article-

“Determine What Drives You - as humans are enticed by one or more of the following: Take a look and see which one(s) you can relate to. Ambition Money Independence- To feel in charge of your own life Security- job security, financial security, peace of mind Status/Power/Prestige Self-esteem/The good feeling you get after getting the task done Opportunity to improve, to grow and become more capable. Recognition and respect from others after a job well done. Making a difference/ the feeling you get inside You are competitive/ you have to feel that you are gaining ground and winning every time. ”. [1]

Like I said each person has different trigger, one or many of these above mentioned factors works. I know what makes me motivated and I can tell it just from her above points.

I can’t help sharing a real story about a bug finding that was crucial in terms of time and impression of the company to the (influential) client and also how I got my reward at the end.

Without mentioning anyone's name, let’s say some company sell different device/ equipment to their clients. After purchase, sales rep goes and does a in-service (describes how it works, what to do etc) session with the client. During the in-service session, sales rep struggled with few issues with the device. This device is driven by software. On the software, you select a patient, then select a protocol and run the test and the device starts running with “patients”. (Patients, not regular healthy human being. So it is pretty important to work safely and more importantly it should work as “expected”.)

So Sales rep selected a patient and then selected a protocol that was created and then running the test. During the test, sales rep observed that it is not working properly. So the sales rep places call with service department to provide an solution so that client can run the machine. It went back and forth with sales rep and service department and they could not find any solution. Service department could not reproduce the issue. After two weeks, with no solution, it was getting more and more frustrating to the sales rep and to the client.

So I got a mail, after two weeks of the incident, from service department that stating the issue and mentioned “Customer is getting quite frustrated with this ”.  The way it was reported by service department was not enough (and to some extent it was misleading).

Their complaint was :

1. “The torque is set for 300 ft-lbs for all sets (10 of them), At some point during testing, the system locks up.  At that point they look at the protocol and it has reset all the torques to 6.”

2. At some point of time, they see out if 10 sets, 4 of them retained the 300 ft-lbs values and rest of them changed to 6.
3. When they are in above situation (#2), system does not behave properly.  

So I started my usual methods of getting info about the issue they were getting.

1. Asked for the details step by step procedure how they created protocol (as they created it with modified values, not with default values)
2. Asked how did they run the test
3. Snapshots of each screen they were going it through
4. If possible video of the whole issue that was happening.

While waiting for the things that I asked, I went to service department to see how did they try to duplicate the issue. First step was to create a custom protocol with a 10 set, 300 ft-lbs torque value. They created the protocol for 10 set with 300 torque value and saved the protocol. Upon retrieval, it also shows the value. So we did not see anything obvious there. Then continued with the second step to run it. It was okay as well. So, it is true that service department could not duplicate the issue. I spent some time trying to duplicate the issue and could not figure out initially. Then to rule out whether it’s a machine dependent issue, I again asked them to create the same thing on another machine. On a second try,  they created the protocol by directly typing the 300 value to the drop down box and then saving it. While creating it, they entered all the value and then found it was supposed to be Exercise type and not test type. So then changed the type and noticed that all the torque value resets to defaults value “6” instead of “300”. Now that’s a good news to me that we at least seen the scenario what sales rep was seeing at client site. As sales rep will be going back to that site again, she wanted a solution before she can go back there. I’m under pressure to find the problem or provide them alternate solution. At that point I tried to give one alternate solution so that they can work with something. So I kept digging.

While doing it repeatedly (entering the value on the torque), at some point of time I exited out from application and came back to retrieve that protocol and found it defaults to value “6” instead of “300”. This is the second time it happened and two different way. Meanwhile I received more info that I requested for and it was more or less same what service department did. As I have seen the first complaint i tried to concentrate on that. Rest of the complaint was based on invalid state, so I gave less importance to them. I know the problem started from protocol screen so i tried few more combination on that screen. One time, when I selected the value of 300 from the drop down and saved the protocol for each of the 10 set and it Worked!

Finally, found the problem. Silly problem but it was crucial at that moment. Basically the problem was, as a drop down box, like all other drop down box of that screen, user supposed to select value from the list and not directly enter the value.  The reason they entered the value was the 300 value was at the bottom of few listed values. It would take some time to select from the end of the list and do it 10 times. User choose shortcut, application did not restrict it and did not support it. When user enter the value application does not recognize the value as listed value and thus defaults back to value “6”. This scenario also explains about their complain of #2.

What is the relation of this finding to the motivation? Well the answer come to the last part of the story. So, finally when I figured out the issue, I relay it to sales rep. Sales rep avoided that scenario and everything went smooth. It’s a minor bug with the software but as long as user does what they supposed to do, we have a interim solution. Client was happy with the solution and so does the sales rep (avoided embarrassing situation at the client site).

Sales rep was so happy with the effort (and kind enough) she wrote a mail to the company president about her experience at the client site and the way we provided her solution under stress. She explained the crucial moment “customer's confidence in us was shrinking! ” and then the way we gave us the solution, she was able to gain it back. She wrote, “The reason for my email is just to compliment everyone for their teamwork and undying effort to get this resolved.” “Upon leaving <Client site> today, their head trainer gave me a hug and has invited me back for further in-service training. I love it! This worked exactly as things should for the customer!  ”.  And then my president thanked me as well in a reply.

I could not help myself quoting from her mail. Those are the words that motivates me doing my work more and more. I’m a tester, do not provide a bug fix, but provides/ offers alternate solution to avoid the scenario and keep going for the time being. As long as I get inspiring words like this, these are my rewards that helps me doing what I do and what considered as boring job to many people. Money is not all we live for, as per Audrey Marlene's article,  I had “Self-esteem/The good feeling you get after getting the task done”, “Recognition and respect from others after a job well done”, “Making a difference/ the feeling you get inside”.

Sources:

[1]. Motivation by Audrey Marlene, MS