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~ using my evil powers for good

Monthly Archives: October 2012

Pushing the envelope

08 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by claire in Experiences

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vicious ATM slot
This morning, on my way to work, I stopped by the bank to deposit some checks. Knowing that I was much too early for a teller to be present at the drive through window, I pulled up to the handy dandy automatic teller machine at my local branch. Some months back, the bank had upgraded its hardware to optical character recognition for depositing checks. I think this is a cool feature as it saves me from sleepily misreading or carelessly fatfingering the amounts on the checks. However, in order to use OCR, the ATM must be able to scan the front of each check, which precludes using an envelope – as is traditional for deposits in ATM machines.

Having some experience with the OCR ATM and this machine in particular, I thought nothing of my task, just a quick errand that would only momentarily delay my commute. So I drove up to the machine, dutifully endorsed my checks, and carefully aligned them for depositing according to the easy-to-read sticker below the deposit slot. After proffering my card and punching in my code, the ATM’s maw gaped and hungrily consumed my would-be dollars. However, this morning was not like other mornings and the ATM encountered an error in reading the checks, displaying a message that envelopes were no longer accepted for check deposit. It attempted to feed the lot back out of the slot, crumpling them up just inside the automatic door of the deposit slot. Knowing that the bank personnel were not available at that moment, I resolved to find a workaround.

With headlights in my rearview mirror and fearing for my fingertips, I carefully shifted the edges until I was able to extract the checks and reexamined them. The only interesting variation that I observed was that 2 of the 3 checks were large, preprinted by businesses, while 1 was small and hand-written. Although the slot sticker showed an image of varying check sizes with small checks on top, the machine’s behavior did not conform to this end-user documentation. Fortunately, I was able to manually feed in the checks one at a time, which was not quite the simplest happy path since I was adding each in turn to a single transaction. Just to confirm, I selected the receipt with check images and verified that my scenario had completed successfully, averting a lot of frustration not only for me but for the line of cars inching closer behind me. Still, I’ll think twice about using the ATM outside of normal business hours… no point in pushing my luck.

Image source

E v A

05 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by claire in Automation, Exploratory Testing, Podcast, Publications, TestCoachCamp 2012, TWiST

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EvA

Back during Test Coach Camp 2012, Michael Larsen made some great recordings of our open space sessions. Subsequently, he published Ken Pier‘s session topic E vs A – Huh? under the title Exploratory vs. Automation in the TWiST podcast feed.

I had fun explaining our testing team’s approach to exploratory testing and automation while learning from some helpful members of the testing community, including Cem Kaner, Doug Hoffman, Matt Barcomb, Phil McNeely, and Michael Larsen.

Check it out!

You can stream these podcasts online or download after registering for the Software Test Professionals’ website, and membership is free.

Here are the direct links (once you log in):

Exploratory vs. Automation, Part 1
Exploratory vs. Automation, Part 2

Image source
(P.S. I can’t resist reading this article that pointed me to the image: The Semiotics of Hello Dolly!)

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