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.