Personal, Testing

Akron and the Abi Field

7 Comments

When the going gets tough at work (as it is now), I often wonder why I do what I do. This is one of the little stories that remind me why I am a software tester.

Martin works for SkyScanner, a flight pricing site. He was testing out some code one evening, a couple of months ago, and ran into the sort of frozen-brain feeling you get after too long at the keyboard. So he pushed his wheely chair back from his desk, into my line of sight.

“Bun,” he said, “Name me two destinations. Just any cities.”

“Düsseldorf,” I replied, “and Akron, Ohio.”

“Thanks,” he said, and wheeled back to his desk to fiddle with the new test data. taptaptap. “[insert curse word].” taptaptap. “[insert worse curse word].” taptaptap.

I looked up as he rolled back into my line of sight, looking exasperated. “How do you do that?”

Turns out that Akron, Ohio, USA, is served by two airports, Akron and Akron Canton. And some clever soul, somewhere in the ancestry of the data they were working with, had remapped Akron Canton to Guangzhou Province in China. That was giving him some…funny results.

So they had to go clean up their data. And I remembered why I’m a software tester.

7 thoughts on “Akron and the Abi Field”

  2. Akron-Canton is the airport I’ve flown into each time I’ve had to go to northeastern Ohio (mostly because Air Tran doesn’t fly to Cleveland, and Delta is evil, evil, evil). Having a son who goes to college just west of Cleveland means I have a reason to go there.

    BTW, what’s the cheapest way to get from Akron to Düsseldorf?

  3. Quote: “what’s the cheapest way to get from Akron to Düsseldorf”

    By foot, but it takes along time. 😉

  4. I’ll say it would take a long time! The walk under the Atlantic would be very hard (that would also be true for the walk over the ice in the other direction, especially with global warming).

  7. minorthreat,

    I would think that if you were trying to sell something from that URL of yours, you’d actually write the kind of comment that would make people want to contact you.

    Fail.

    Or perhaps you were hoping to add something interesting to the conversation.

    Fail.

    Maybe you were simply trying to show what an intelligent and perceptive person you are.

    Fail.

    Thank you for playing.

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