Thu, 27 Mar 2014

Bug reports

I've noticed that many testers, project/program/product managers, ... have no idea on how to properly report bugs, or request new features.

It's well known that developers will do everything they can to avoid actually writing code, so it's vitally important to avoid falling for their traps when reporting a bug. My fellow developers will be angry with me for giving away this secret information, but, well, it wants to be free!

Here are a few hints:

In conclusion, the ideal bug report is "It breaky. You fix.".

In case someone doesn't get it, the above suggestions are NOT something you should do in bug reports. Unfortunately just about all of these are based on one or more bug reports I have received over the years.

posted at: 22:22 | path: /rant | [ 0 comments ]

Sun, 29 Dec 2013

Hotmail

No, I don't use them, but sometimes I send e-mail to people who do. It turns out that they don't like my e-mail. It sends up in the spam bucket.

After finding someone with a little clue who still remembered having a hotmail address I obtained the headers for one of my mails. It had this in it:

Authentication-Results: hotmail.com; spf=temperror ...

The OpenSPF people explain what this means:
Hotmail does not use live DNS for Sender ID. They have a DNS cache that they update twice per day. All TempError means is that your domain's SPF record is not in their cache. To get your record added to their cache, send an e-mail message to senderid@microsoft.com with your domain in it. They will add it, but be patient as it's a manual process and the cache only updates twice a day.

It appears that Microsoft don't even understand DNS (or e-mail). Why does that still surprise me?

posted at: 16:42 | path: /rant | [ 0 comments ]