Testing problems?

 asked:

What is the most serious problem you have ever found?

  • I can give you two examples, both in the French language. We were testing an insurance management tool that had a payment method for cheques (American English "checks"). This is still very common in the US, but in Europe we don't even have checks any more. But the English word check can mean so many things, so as translations are often carried out without context the translation was actually the same as "to verify" and not the check number. Since they have not had checks for so many years in Europe a lot of translators don't even know them any more. So in context it was not understandable.

    The other example was for a medical device used for the screening of pregnant women where there was a"translatable string "number of foetus", and instead of just having numbers they had words, in English "single". This was translated as "not married"! So again the context makes a lot of difference in how you translate something. This was a very serious isue and we raised it with the client as a showstopper for the release of the product.

    We do get nervous when we don't find any issues as it's highly unlkely we won't find any! We run statistics and we have 99.7% of the issues we raised as being valid. So this is a very good measure of what we record being an issue.