A guerrilla blog post from GTAC 2011.
The organizers of this year’s GTAC, are attempting to get us nerds at the conference to socialize with each other. When I checked into the conference this morning, a fistful of buttons with a yellow “A” were shoved at me. Before the keynote, James Whittaker let all of us know that we were given the buttons specifically so that we would trade them and “be social.” If we get all of them, they spell out “GTAC” and then there’s one button which has a picture of the cloud. Rumor has it, that if we want the cloud button we should find bugs in the GTAC android app and tweet them.
The gtac app is intended for use by conference attendees for viewing the schedule, making tweets, taking notes about the conference etc.
My former Atlassian partner in testing crime, Mark Hrynczak and I decided to pair on looking for bugs. We had a great time testing Confluence together so we decided to pair on breaking the GTAC app. If this a test automation conference, did we run off and make a bunch of automated mobile tests? Um, no. It didn’t take us much playing with the app to find a couple of crashes and a few oddities.
Here’s Mark with our first crash:
Steps to reproduce:
1. open the app
2. tilt the phone sideways.
Here I am with our 2nd crash:
Steps to reproduce:
1. install the app on an android tablet
2. try to open it.
After Mark and I finished playing with the app together, my phone started tossing up errors from, guess what…the gtac app!
Aside from crashes, we found some other issues. While I wouldn’t consider these as serious or impactful as a crash, I’d probably raise issues for these. (Just don’t ask if they’d be raised in JIRA or Bugzilla.)
1. We couldn’t figure out where to add notes initially. When click on notes, it opens a page where there’s no way to add a note.
2. Notes don’t link back to sessions.
3. Notes are saved in email as an xml file. What am I going to do with notes in xml format? I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the habit of reading through my notes as an xml file.
4. Why have notes as separate choice if they are attached to sessions?
5. Opening tweets and hitting back doesn’t take the user back to the gtac app. It’s like the app is expecting you to press the one button at the bottom of the interface (o wait, that’s the iphone).
6. There is a “sandbox” tab in the “starred items” window. Why?
7. None of the sessions, including keynotes, list the speaker
After we found the first crash, I rushed up to James Whittaker with Mark and said, “Hey you! We broke your fancy gtac app!! Can we get a pin!” James, who was on the way to the podium looked at me and said, “This is the last time I ask for bugs at a testing conference…you should tweet your find.” So I did. A few minutes later, a googler I had been sitting with at lunch came over and gave me a cloud pin.
This leaves me with a dilemma. While the pin was given specifically to me, Mark and I worked on these bugs together so it’s only fair to work something out especially since a cloud pin means you get a prize at the end of the conference. If you’re a Googler at GTAC reading this post and you still have a cloud pin, please consider giving it to Mark (or if you can’t find him, I’m happy to pass it along.)
Update: Supposedly bugs in the app have been fixed. Hmm…