Good Things From Bad Bugs

A recent posting on the Software Testing Club about memorable bugs you had found got me thinking...

I posted to the discussion about how it was a tester missing a bug that led to me becoming a tester and then I thought about other bugs that had been memorable to me

The 15 second bug

Having established a reputation as someone who could break a program very easily, one day one of the programmers feeling quite confident about his code challenged me to see how fast I could break his latest release.
He was somewhat ashen faced when 15 seconds later I had a crash to show him. It was nothing special - one of the old testers bag of tricks of leaving an input field blank and I knew this particular programmer had a history of doing that ( he never seemed to learn )
Why was this memorable ? Because it established my credibility with the programmers ( I did it in front of few of them just like a magician ), they wanted to know how I did it so fast and some of them began to learn what to do to do testing themselves, it was the start of getting them test infected.

The Competition Bug

This was when I got my first inkling that I was a tester. I was in a team of programmers working on a new system and one of the programmers found a bug in my part of the code. Much teasing and pointing of fingers. So of course I had to be childish and retaliate and try to find a bug in HIS code. Easy. Then I found another. And another. And another and soon he was begging for mercy.
And we were wondering why the test team weren't finding these bugs so I ended up spending more and more time testing rather than programming.
Sadly at the end of the project I was moved back to programming but it was something I remembered a few years later when I was considering a career change.
( Good thing I wrote code with bugs in it !! )

So, bugs don't always have negative consequences