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One of my first jobs was QA for some printer-scanner-copier machines at HP. My favorite bug that I found was that I had an 8x10 photo of my girlfriend at the ti

One of my first jobs was QA for some printer-scanner-copier machines at HP. My favorite bug that I found was that I had an 8x10 photo of my girlfriend at the time, scanning which bricked the device. We were never able to find another way to reproduce so that photo ended up in the regression suite's archive of assets (maybe it's still there). The relationship didn't last, so the morale of the story ended up being always trust software defects when it comes to relationships. This turned out to be especially true later when a pretty egregious Myspace bug introduced me to my wife :)

rsync 12y ago
The notion of a printer/scanner group, or producer, or team doing QA is one that makes me want to laugh, then cry. Printers are such unimaginable sources of pain, such a crippling tax on everyone forced to interact with them in any way, that it's hard to imagine anyone working to produce them in any standard, structured way.
- reinhardt 12y ago
  Printers were sent from hell to make us miserable: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers
- famousactress 12y ago
  "Printers are such unimaginable sources of pain" Well either you've a severely lacking imagination or have had a really comfortable life. I hope for the latter :) Kidding though, yeah printers are frustrating and cobbling together a printer-fax-copier-scanner into one device is even more terrible. HP was really serious about process though! The test group was literally bigger (more people) than the dev team.. by probably a factor of almost 2. HP was really big on Model Based Testing [1] and we read books and maybe even had a class on it when joining. The QA team was all in all pretty high functioning, if memory serves.. but the products would still get shipped with four figures of open bug reports (I am not kidding or exaggerating). The sort of bugs at the start of the cycle were downright terrifying, too. If your printer has never caught fire, or vomited all of it's ink on your desk in the middle of the night... thank your friendly HP QA employee! Mostly in my era the problems with the products were that they were done on a pretty tight schedule (6-12 months) for what tended to amount to more complex/new hardware than folks would initially expect. The testing cycle also started pretty late because the initial "get it barely working" cycle ate up a couple-few months, and the non-firmware software (drivers and crapware utilities) got very little attention by the a-players on the team. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_testing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_testing
AceJohnny2 12y ago
unrelated to the topic at hand, is your username a reference to Hedy Lamarr?
- famousactress 12y ago
  No. Just a totally ridiculous random handle I imagined up when I needed a throwaway account years ago that accidentally stuck. It's pretty embarrassing when retail stores ask me for my email to send me a receipt.
owenversteeg 12y ago
Do you still have the picture? I would love to test it out on one of the old scanners I have. Also, maybe HN could identify the reason for the bug.
- famousactress 12y ago
  Sorry, I don't. At the time I wasn't super technical (started writing automated tests soon after and then landed in development). It was some form of buffer overrun.

rsync 12y ago

The notion of a printer/scanner group, or producer, or team doing QA is one that makes me want to laugh, then cry. Printers are such unimaginable sources of pain, such a crippling tax on everyone forced to interact with them in any way, that it's hard to imagine anyone working to produce them in any standard, structured way.

reinhardt 12y ago
Printers were sent from hell to make us miserable: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers
famousactress 12y ago
"Printers are such unimaginable sources of pain" Well either you've a severely lacking imagination or have had a really comfortable life. I hope for the latter :) Kidding though, yeah printers are frustrating and cobbling together a printer-fax-copier-scanner into one device is even more terrible. HP was really serious about process though! The test group was literally bigger (more people) than the dev team.. by probably a factor of almost 2. HP was really big on Model Based Testing [1] and we read books and maybe even had a class on it when joining. The QA team was all in all pretty high functioning, if memory serves.. but the products would still get shipped with four figures of open bug reports (I am not kidding or exaggerating). The sort of bugs at the start of the cycle were downright terrifying, too. If your printer has never caught fire, or vomited all of it's ink on your desk in the middle of the night... thank your friendly HP QA employee! Mostly in my era the problems with the products were that they were done on a pretty tight schedule (6-12 months) for what tended to amount to more complex/new hardware than folks would initially expect. The testing cycle also started pretty late because the initial "get it barely working" cycle ate up a couple-few months, and the non-firmware software (drivers and crapware utilities) got very little attention by the a-players on the team. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_testing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_testing

AceJohnny2 12y ago

unrelated to the topic at hand, is your username a reference to Hedy Lamarr?

famousactress 12y ago
No. Just a totally ridiculous random handle I imagined up when I needed a throwaway account years ago that accidentally stuck. It's pretty embarrassing when retail stores ask me for my email to send me a receipt.

owenversteeg 12y ago

Do you still have the picture? I would love to test it out on one of the old scanners I have. Also, maybe HN could identify the reason for the bug.

famousactress 12y ago
Sorry, I don't. At the time I wasn't super technical (started writing automated tests soon after and then landed in development). It was some form of buffer overrun.