| One of my most memorable ones: We we're developing an Android app that involved a custom camera implementation. In the camera we we're getting the actual frames (about 15 fps was all we could manage on most Gingerbread devices) and saving them out in a custom file format. We we're dealing with lots of device specific camera issues (HTC had one device with 2 back facing cameras that gave us a lot of trouble), and one day our QA person comes up to us and says: "It's working fine on this device, except it crashes when I try to film out the window." We we're already feeling stressed about all the issues and didn't believe her. We figured it was just some race condition that it was a correlation != causation thing. We asked her to show us, and sure enough time after time you would turn the camera to face the window and it would crash. We showed our manager and the designers, because we couldn't believe how weird it was. The cause and fix turned out to be simple enough. We kept the lights off in the office for the most part, and the camera frame rate was jumping way up when the scene was bright. When the camera turned to the window, the fps went above what we had achieved before, and our app was throwing an OutOfMemoryException, since we weren't dealing with the frames fast enough, and they were stacking up. It drove home the importance of real world testing to us. |