Anutthara's Favorite Bug

There was this bug that I remember even 4 years later now. Since we expect our users to install our product on operating systems of different languages, we do globalization testing on this. So for the Beta release, I installed our product on a Japanese (JPN) Windows 2003 (W2K3) box and tested that the basic functionality was all doing good. Of course, it already worked well on an English W2K3 system - so we were quite happy with the way it went.

Late into the cycle, just for kicks, I installed my product on a German machine and tried to kick off a build. Boom! Crash on just kicking off a build! It was my first product shipping experience - I totally panicked on finding this so late. :) Turned out that the code was checking for user having admin rights by comparing against the hard coded string "Administrator". The bug slipped through the JPN testing because in Japanese OS-es, the user groups are not translated and remain "Administrator" while in German, the user groups are translated into "Administratën" :) Well - lessons learnt: grep through the code to detect hardcoded strings to ensure they are appropriate and don’t do glob testing on a single platform to sign off. We now have clear buckets of issues that can be caught in each language - but you never know what else is missing!

-- Anutthara

 

Do you have a bug whose story you love to tell? Let me know!