Did you break your toys ?

On one of the many testing blogs I subscribe to there was a post about how when the writer was a young boy he would take apart his toys to see how they worked and curiousity is often cited as one of the main traits of a tester

I can remember taking apart a golf ball, a watch and a radio - anyone have any good tales of toys they took apart ?
( and could never put back together )

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Permalink Reply by James Christie on January 7, 2009 at 15:09
Yup. I was always doing it. Sometimes the gnawing feeling of not knowing how something worked was worse than the feeling of failure if I couldn't get it back together again, so pretty much anything mechanical had to get dismantled. The only constraint was parental displeasure if anything valuable was wrecked. Better broken than a mystery was the motto.

When I started in IT things were much the same. I worked at an IBM mainframe site, running VM/CMS for its development environment before we moved to MVS/TSO. All the utilities for program library management, change control, office systems, personal backups/restores, job submission etc were written in CMS Exec2 and Rexx. Happily the code for these utilities was only write protected, and not read or copy protected. That meant we could take our own copies of the utilities, check out how they worked, and pimp them to our own tastes. Any updates to the official versions wouldn't work on our virtual machines, because our personal minidisks were defined as having a higher level of precedence than the system minidisks. So we could selectively apply any official changes. Smarter programmers were able to bypass ACF2 read protection and access pretty much anything.

All good fun, but highly irresponsible. I think the only reason it was tolerated was because no-one senior enough to be outraged could actually understand what we were up to.
Permalink Reply by Jake Brake on January 7, 2009 at 16:05
Permalink Reply by Glenn Halstead on January 8, 2009 at 21:20
Always... Dadddd can you put this back together for me...
Permalink Reply by Glenn Halstead on January 8, 2009 at 21:21
I used to remove electronic components from dead electrical things with a solder sucker... for fun... nerd?
Permalink Reply by TP on January 9, 2009 at 10:39
Great topic. I've put up a blog post about it at http://manualtesting.com/blog/ As a toddler I got hold of the mantel piece clock and took it apart piece by piece. I probably wouldn’t have managed to put it back together again anyway – even if my brother hadn’t eaten half the small clockwork parts – I was never forgiven for that!
Permalink Reply by Jez Nicholson on January 12, 2009 at 10:47
Yes, I took loads of things apart...didn't get many back together again though.

I think that I will add this to my list of questions to use in an interview seeing as it seems to identify a certain type of person.
Permalink Reply by Kate on January 13, 2009 at 13:41
As for me I've never took something apart in that way without put it back together. Usually I chose simple things that could be easily restored. I'm a bit stickler for detail :)

But I found it interesting to discuss with my team members during the lunch. It provoked an amusing discussion. Some stories were similar to the stories described here. Guys told with pleasure about their childish experiments. There were taken apart toy cars, toy trains, broken old hardware or something of the kind.

Of course this caused only parental irritation. But curiosity is a sign of remarkable intelligence. So let your children take the toys and things apart! They may become good specialists in future! :)
Permalink Reply by Thomas Ponnet on January 13, 2009 at 14:57
Don't all kids take old radios apart?

I once tried to find out what's in these small, kid-friendly smoke bombs. Used a bowie knife and tried to cut the thing open which had a really hard shell. Of course I slipped the knife deep into my finger/hand. Didn't feel too good about that, narrowing vision and all that and felt a bit sick. Went to the bathroom and argued with myself if I was feeling sick enought to throw up or if I'd loose consciousness before that... my hand was bleeding all that time when my mother came back from shopping - of course I tried that when alone at home. I think she got the fright of her life...

Started a carrer in the chemical industry as a research scientist later before I came to software testing. Some people never learn I guess...
Permalink Reply by phil kirkham on January 17, 2009 at 17:47
Found out that what triggered my original post was Chapter 5 of the How We Test Software At Microsoft book where Bj Rollison talks about taking apart a slot car when he was a boy

Thought I should credit the source of this discussion - too many books and blogs for me to always remember where I read things
Permalink Reply by Rob Lambert on January 19, 2009 at 16:50
Oh my -yes indeed. You've hit the nail on the head here.

I used to take anything electronic to pieces to see how it worked and then rebuild it. Reverse Engineering is the term I think. I also used to build things from a variety of parts, meaning I often ended up with a hidious contraption that scared the life out of my sister. Winner.

I guess it is a trait of a tester, in that they want to see how things work. I don't apply this to the code of the solution though. I rarely (unless I need to) step in to the code of the product. I check the devs unit tests, test driven development and automated CI builds, I might poke around some log files, inspect the page elements etc , but rarely get in to the working of the programme. I do however, get stuck in to the requirements, documentation, audience and purpose of the product. More from a social aspect of computing than a pure coding aspect.

It still hasn't stopped now - can you class a car as a toy? Cos I still take those to pieces, along with my bikes and I also love a spot of demolition in the house.

hmmmm - interesting social question you have asked here Phil.

Rob
Permalink Reply by phil kirkham on January 19, 2009 at 16:53
Yeh, I love the fact that supermarkets are now having self-service checkouts, lots of opportunities to try and break things...
( as long as you can ignore the tutting from the wife )
Permalink Reply by Rob Lambert on January 19, 2009 at 17:27
Lol - indeed. I actually did break one of them in Asda by putting a crate of coke on the scales and claiming they were apples. The software errored and crashed and I had to be moved to another one. Terminal failure I think the error was.

As it happened I used to work in a supermarket and the one I worked in had an upper weight limit on all fruit and veg, which when exceeded stopped the terminal. As a checkout operator we had to be trained to guess the weight and split them out should they exceed.

I'm sure there is a metaphor for releasing with known issues in there somewhere.

Another good place to test your skills are pay at the pump petrol pumps. Maximum £60 fill - are you sure about that????

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