The Bugs our Crowd Finds - May

Today I want to reintroduce a series about the real bugs our testers find. These bugs exemplify the actual processes that your customers go through when interacting with your app. You can prevent these types of issues from ever reaching your users with thorough and creative software testing, like the kind performed by our community of testers. Here are some of the more critical issues we've prevented from reaching production in the past month, their details, and some takeaways from which we can learn.   

This was found by one of our testers while web testing a short-term apartment rental site.  

Bug: When the user selects "Queens, New York, NY, USA" and any date, no options appear in the PLP, and you can't book an apartment, although the page indicates: "Find 400+ Furnished Apartments in Queens."  

The user would expect to be able to see the options of the apartments and to be able to book when he selects "Queens, New York, NY, USA," since the page indicates: "Find 400+ Furnished Apartments in Queens"  

When the user selects "Queens, New York, NY, USA" and any date, no options appear, and you can't book an apartment in Queens. 

In all likelihood, the text "400 + Furnished Apartments in Queens" was not tied to any of the housing data and more of a marketing hope promise. Depending on the location of this type of text, it can mislead the consumer. So it's important to keep in mind what parts of your product and marketing you can tie together to give your customers accurate expectations.   

This next issue occurred while testing an eCommerce company's IOS app.   

Bug: App crashes when tapping the Search button with a keyword in double-quotes. 

The app will display the relevant result when searching. Note: the keyword "Hightech" was in multiple product information pages and descriptions.  

The app crashed when searching for the "Hightech" keyword!  

During traditional test case-based testing, it can be hard to predict this kind of behavior. But for a seasoned consumer who uses Google all the time, using quotation marks to denote an "exact" search can be commonplace. This shows the importance of making features familiar to people in their daily lives available in your apps as well.   

Here is a bug that was found while testing an event planning application.   

Bug: [Create a plan and invite a user] The daily plan disappears from the calendar if the users time zone changes from Kiev, UA to Seattle, WA, USA (same day timezone) (later replicated with any time zone change)  

The plan continues to be displayed on the calendar.  

When the time zone of the device changes, the plan disappears.  

This application is available internationally and allows users to make plans with people around the world. It is an excellent app that encourages real-world connections, and sometimes people must travel to make those plans a reality. When this happens, time zones may change. While not typical, this is a crucial thing to consider, especially if your application allows international communication.  

This next one was found on an app that allows individuals to stay in touch with their friends around the world. 

Bug: After the user inputs a search keyword using the native voice command available in the iPhone keyboard, the app crashes. 

The result list should be displayed.  

The app crashes shortly after the user inputs a keyword using the voice feature. 

Voice commands are an essential feature of websites and applications that are trying to reach compliance with ADA laws. Similar bugs were found across multiple companies highlighting a disconnect between new laws and current standard practices. Now that this need has been pushed to the forefront by lawmakers, developers should put it in the front of their minds when testing and developing new features. 

This application allows customers to purchase flights. 

Bug: The app freezes and the user becomes stuck when they tap to share their trip to WhatsApp. 

I expected that users would not get stuck when they tap and share their trip to an unlogged in WhatsApp. I thought they would get the login prompt.  

As observed, the app freezes when the user taps to share their trip to an unlogged in WhatsApp. 

In an increasingly social world, people desire the ability to share things. However, with the plethora of social media apps, it creates several possible variations and setups to account for. While some issues are not controllable on your end, its important to make sure that you control the ones that you can and test for the ones you can't. Users can't always distinguish whats a 3rd party issue and what's an in-app issue. All they experience is the bug. 

As you can see, there all kinds of bugs out there that may seem like edge cases to a developer but seriously impact the users. That's why companies invest in thorough and thoughtful software QA. If you want to see what kind of bugs our crowd can find on your website or app, reach out here.