And Now Repeat

As we were triaging that day's bug reports, the Dev Manager and me, we reached one that I'd filed. After skimming it to remind himself of the contents, the Dev Manager commented "ah yes, here's one of your favourite M.O.s ..."

In this case I'd created a particular flavour of an object by a specific action and then found that I could reapply the action to cause the object to become corrupted. Fortunately for our product, this kind of object is created only rarely and there's little occasion - although valid reasons - to do what I did with one.

The Dev Manager carried on "... if you can find a way to connect something that links out back to itself, or to make something that takes input read its own output, or to make something and then try to remake it, or stuff it back into itself ... you will."

Fascinating. It should come as no surprise to find that those with a different perspective to us see different things in us. And, in fact, I was not surprised to find that I use this kind of approach. But once I was aware that others see it as a thing and observe value in it, I could feed that back into our testing consciously.

Connecting my output to my input to my output ...

Image: https://flic.kr/p/f3JZn6

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