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Comment by rzimmerman

9 years ago

Another (real) story of my own:

We had a piece of software that would present a dialog for the user to select a file, then parse and send the contents to an embedded device. This software was an internal tool and not very reliable, so it would crash if you selected a file with invalid contents.

Two engineers, Dan and Brian, came to me with a tricky problem. Every time Dan would open a specific file everything would work fine. Every time Brian selected the same file the program would crash. I was obviously skeptical and went to watch. We tried it 10-20 times and sure enough, it always failed for Brian and worked for Dan. I watched them perform the exact same steps.

Eventually I gave it a try myself and realized what was going on. Dan would click "open", select the file, then click OK. Brian would click "open" then double click the file.

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rzimmerman

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JSoet  9 years ago

I had a similar story from just a few weeks ago. One of my colleagues was having trouble logging into his test instance, but he was the only one having this problem. Tried on my machine and it worked fine, made sure we were both using the exact same version of the code, etc. and he continued to have the problem while I didn't... Eventually we realized that he only had this problem on firefox and not chrome, and then we finally realized that the problem was in Firefox he had his credentials saved and was hitting the 'Login' button, whereas on Chrome he was typing them in and hitting enter, which is apparently what I and the rest of my colleagues also do, but luckily he found that bug with a slight difference in the logic between the two paths before it went to production.