left hand meet right hand

Rob Lambert recently blogged about Checking what other system allow - an online form asked for his Twitter name but wasn't able to process it as it didn't allow the same range of characters that Twitter does.

Maybe it was this post that made me more alert for examples of this as after reading this I found a discrepancy within a system ( never mind between systems ).

An app allows a user to be created and gives some guidance on creating a name and suggests using your email name. Makes sense as user names are system wide so as soon as someone has created 'Bob' then the second Bob has to try Bob1 or BobC and after a few months the ninety ninth bob has to spend several minutes trying to find a Bob that isn't taken.

So far so good.

Then an enhancement is proposed for the app that generates some output files. The files have to be given unique names but ones that are associated with the user. So the spec suggests using the username as part of the file name and gives an example as 'data_Mark.txt'.
Seems almost reasonable until you remember the earlier suggestion of using your email as a username. 'data_mark.specwriter@notthoughtthrough.com.txt' doesn't seem such a good idea...

so thanks to Rob for making me aware of checking the consistency of a system - and shows how testing memes can spread