This news article where a hairdresser’s client went bald after a power loss in the salon reminded me of a test I frequently forget to run.
Power off your system or server while in the middle of testing and look for problems. You’ll most frequently find issues if you aim for a power outage -
- in the middle of a network communication (eg. client-server apps or network games).
- in the middle of a multi-step transaction.
- in the middle of disk operations.
The last one’s pretty brutal, but sometimes you need to know your application can survive it gracefully. Have fun!
Authors bio is coming up shortly.
hah! i still have nightmares about doing lotchecks on the DS. part of the Nintendo acceptance criteria was to do the first and last ones at every key point in the game. menu screens. loading screens. the various stages of setting up multiplayer wifi games… everywhere… plus you also have to do itall again when putting the device into sleepmode too!
Ah, the good old days of game testing…Thanks for the memories