Yesterday was an extremely productive day for me – I got a lot done. A lot of work involving a lot of effort, considerable time and a good amount of thinking (most of the things I put my energy and effort towards require thinking).  It was a good day in terms of productivity.  I also encountered a lot of errors & crashes – but I wasn’t testing.

Now let me explain – as a Software Tester I encounter (and generate) a lot of errors, crashes, undesirable/inconsistent/unpredictable behaviours during my investigation of an application.  The errors & crashes I encountered yesterday happened while I wasn’t testing.  They happend while I was using different software applications to complete or perform some tasks – this type of thing isn’t rare for me. What is rare is that the errors & crashes I encountered yesterday happened while I was using different software applications to complete or perform tasks on all 3 of my devices.

A software application I had been using on my laptop as a project and test management tool generated an error and crashed 3 different times – first generating an error message and then ending abruptly seconds later. The error message generated was displayed on the screen for barely a second – I had no time to even read a word it said.  The first time it happend the processes “crippled” my entire machine and I had to restart it.

A few hours later after I had completed my “priority tasks” for the day, I was in relaxation mode. I thought I’d search for an action movie to rent or possibly purchase on my tablet. For some reason every time I filtered the movie selection by action movies the app would crash on my tablet.  After 3 times I gave up – wasn’t my night to watch a movie.

A few hours after that I wasn’t asleep as I should’ve been (I guess the 80km/h winds outside had something to do with it) I decided to reactivate the iMessage service on my phone. I had turned it off earlier in the day for a particular reason.  I was prompted to entered my password to activate it and for some reason I just wasn’t able to activate it. After a few tries (I think it was about 3) I decided to give up and leave it alone until the following morning.  This morning I entered the password once and I was able to reactivate it within seconds.

I guess there will be days like that – I just didn’t foresee it happening while I wasn’t officially testing, and on all 3 devices.