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Exactly. I found myself asking "but how would draining batteries help them?". I think lots of companies already do stuff like this, for example, Microsoft roll

by bArray 4y ago

Exactly. I found myself asking "but how would draining batteries help them?". I think lots of companies already do stuff like this, for example, Microsoft rolls out updates to smaller groups before doing larger deployments. Google Chrome tests some experimental features before a full deployment. It would be better if there was simply an opt-out of being part of this testing group. If the user goes to the effort of opting out, then they likely have a good reason for this. Also maybe Facebook also doesn't want to run this on devices with already bad battery performance for example.

bjornsing 4y ago
But why would you call something like that "negative testing"? Maybe I'm being too cynical, but my interpretation was that they wanted to know e.g. how many would uninstall the app if it consumed more power. Would make business sense to test this, and would be logical to call it "negative testing": do something negative to the user and see if they react.
nmstoker 4y ago
They want to know how the app acts when a phone is in a low power state (because power profiles often kick in only then and that can meet to bad UX) Thus the intent seems to be: delivering put some users' phones into the state desired for tests (ie by draining their battery till they're at that level) and then commence the tests. In a lab it's all very clinical, but what if the test subject happens to be stalked at the time, desperately needs to make a phone call for help and then the device runs out of power at the critical point? That's obviously a made up, cherry picked example, but with large enough numbers you can expect that something like this would occur. What's odd to me is that they don't seem to have been comfortable just getting test results from users whose phone battery state is at the desired level naturally (there's no major ethical issue where you, the tester, haven't caused the low battery provided you're not subsequently taking battery down to zero)

by bArray 4y ago

bjornsing 4y ago

But why would you call something like that "negative testing"? Maybe I'm being too cynical, but my interpretation was that they wanted to know e.g. how many would uninstall the app if it consumed more power. Would make business sense to test this, and would be logical to call it "negative testing": do something negative to the user and see if they react.

nmstoker 4y ago

They want to know how the app acts when a phone is in a low power state (because power profiles often kick in only then and that can meet to bad UX) Thus the intent seems to be: delivering put some users' phones into the state desired for tests (ie by draining their battery till they're at that level) and then commence the tests. In a lab it's all very clinical, but what if the test subject happens to be stalked at the time, desperately needs to make a phone call for help and then the device runs out of power at the critical point? That's obviously a made up, cherry picked example, but with large enough numbers you can expect that something like this would occur. What's odd to me is that they don't seem to have been comfortable just getting test results from users whose phone battery state is at the desired level naturally (there's no major ethical issue where you, the tester, haven't caused the low battery provided you're not subsequently taking battery down to zero)