2928: Software Testing Day - Revision history

172.70.86.232: /* Explanation */ I've a feeling I could explain this better, maybe link tohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing and a whole other rabbithole of possible wikiwalking.

2024-07-22T15:24:04Z

‎Explanation: I've a feeling I could explain this better, maybe link tohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing and a whole other rabbithole of possible wikiwalking.

BunsenH: unsigned vs. signed

2024-07-22T14:47:56Z

unsigned vs. signed

Hawthorn: Added detail on negative values.

2024-07-22T09:55:05Z

Added detail on negative values.

Hawthorn: Nothing in the comic remotely suggests a link to Cartoonist Day, other than a loose coincidence in its publication date. Both the title and caption make it clear what the context is. Also, this trivia shouldn't be placed before the intro anyway.

2024-07-22T09:43:34Z

Nothing in the comic remotely suggests a link to Cartoonist Day, other than a loose coincidence in its publication date. Both the title and caption make it clear what the context is. Also, this trivia shouldn't be placed before the intro anyway.

172.69.195.67: /* Unusual date-time notation in real life */

2024-06-05T14:48:14Z

‎Unusual date-time notation in real life

172.70.160.249: /* Explanation */ Not necessarily 'abuse'. Could be perfectly valid calculation.

2024-05-12T13:07:55Z

‎Explanation: Not necessarily 'abuse'. Could be perfectly valid calculation.

B for brain: /* Explanation */

2024-05-12T10:52:47Z

‎Explanation

Elektrizikekswerk: /* Explanation */

2024-05-07T08:18:00Z

‎Explanation

172.70.127.68: /* Explanation */

2024-05-06T19:56:17Z

‎Explanation

Asdf: /* Explanation */ military time would omit the colon

2024-05-06T19:47:32Z

‎Explanation: military time would omit the colon

@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 For example, here it seems that Software Testing Day, a day likely celebrated by QA engineers, takes place every &minus;1 years on January 0th at 25:71 PM. That statement is nonsensical in the following ways:
-* The frequency of a recurring event is always expressed as a positive amount of time, so a negative value like “every &minus;1 years” does not make sense. Negative values are an often-overlooked edge case in software, as they are valid numeric values that the computer will happily accept and work with unless specifically told not to. Depending on what the software is designed to do, this could result in unexpected behavior that could produce nonsensical results or crash the system. Under some circumstances, one piece of code can interpret a value as a small negative number, while another piece of code interprets ''the same value'' as a very large positive number. A variable that one section interprets as −1 {{w|Two's_complement|might be interpreted elsewhere}} as 255, 65535, 4294967295, or even more.
+* The frequency of a recurring event is always expressed as a positive amount of time, so a negative value like “every &minus;1 years” does not make sense. Negative values are an often-overlooked edge case in software, as they are valid numeric values that the computer will happily accept and work with unless specifically told not to. Depending on what the software is designed to do, this could result in unexpected behavior that could produce nonsensical results or crash the system. Under some circumstances, one piece of code can interpret a value as a small negative number, while another piece of code interprets ''the same value'' as a very large positive number. A variable that one section interprets as −1 {{w|Two's_complement|might be interpreted elsewhere}} as 255, 65535, 4294967295, or even more, unless the software is either very strongly-typed (so as to actively prevent ''any'' casual attempt to change the understood context and value of data) or consistently weakly-typed throughout (the user does not normally define the type, automatic data-typing internalises the understanding (and any conversion) for anything the user does not deliberately make abstract for their own purposes).
 * The first day of the month is the 1st, not the 0th.  (There is an entire ''category'' of bugs/errors which result from numbering systems being mistaken for {{w|Zero-based_numbering|starting with 0 instead of 1}}, or vice versa.)
 * There are ({{w|Daylight_saving_time|in most cases}}) only 24 hours in a day, so “25” is (in most cases) too large, and even where there is a switch from Daylight Saving Time, clocks simply repeat the hour before midnight, so the numbers above 24 hours are not displayed, even if using the 24-hour notation.
 ** In addition, the “PM” suggests that it is a 12-hour time, so the expected range of values for the hour is 1 to 12, making the “25” even more nonsensical.
-* There are only 60 minutes in an hour, so “71” is too large for a minute value.
+* There are only 60 minutes in an hour, so “71” is too large for a normally anticipated minute value.
 Apparently, though this date is nonsensical, the QA engineers have decided to make this date a celebration day. Probably since, as expressed in the comic, the software for keeping track of the date has crashed. Another interpretation of this comic could be how software always crashes in one form or another when being tested, and thus the nonsensical date implies that successful runs of software is never celebrated.

@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 For example, here it seems that Software Testing Day, a day likely celebrated by QA engineers, takes place every &minus;1 years on January 0th at 25:71 PM. That statement is nonsensical in the following ways:
-* The frequency of a recurring event is always expressed as a positive amount of time, so a negative value like “every &minus;1 years” does not make sense. Negative values are an often-overlooked edge case in software, as they are valid numeric values that the computer will happily accept and work with unless specifically told not to. Depending on what the software is designed to do, this could result in unexpected behavior that could produce nonsensical results or crash the system.
+* The frequency of a recurring event is always expressed as a positive amount of time, so a negative value like “every &minus;1 years” does not make sense. Negative values are an often-overlooked edge case in software, as they are valid numeric values that the computer will happily accept and work with unless specifically told not to. Depending on what the software is designed to do, this could result in unexpected behavior that could produce nonsensical results or crash the system. Under some circumstances, one piece of code can interpret a value as a small negative number, while another piece of code interprets ''the same value'' as a very large positive number. A variable that one section interprets as −1 {{w|Two's_complement|might be interpreted elsewhere}} as 255, 65535, 4294967295, or even more.
 * The first day of the month is the 1st, not the 0th.  (There is an entire ''category'' of bugs/errors which result from numbering systems being mistaken for {{w|Zero-based_numbering|starting with 0 instead of 1}}, or vice versa.)
 * There are ({{w|Daylight_saving_time|in most cases}}) only 24 hours in a day, so “25” is (in most cases) too large, and even where there is a switch from Daylight Saving Time, clocks simply repeat the hour before midnight, so the numbers above 24 hours are not displayed, even if using the 24-hour notation.

@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 For example, here it seems that Software Testing Day, a day likely celebrated by QA engineers, takes place every &minus;1 years on January 0th at 25:71 PM. That statement is nonsensical in the following ways:
-* The frequency of a recurring event is always expressed as a positive amount of time, so a negative value like “every &minus;1 years” does not make sense.
+* The frequency of a recurring event is always expressed as a positive amount of time, so a negative value like “every &minus;1 years” does not make sense. Negative values are an often-overlooked edge case in software, as they are valid numeric values that the computer will happily accept and work with unless specifically told not to. Depending on what the software is designed to do, this could result in unexpected behavior that could produce nonsensical results or crash the system.
 * The first day of the month is the 1st, not the 0th.  (There is an entire ''category'' of bugs/errors which result from numbering systems being mistaken for {{w|Zero-based_numbering|starting with 0 instead of 1}}, or vice versa.)
 * There are ({{w|Daylight_saving_time|in most cases}}) only 24 hours in a day, so “25” is (in most cases) too large, and even where there is a switch from Daylight Saving Time, clocks simply repeat the hour before midnight, so the numbers above 24 hours are not displayed, even if using the 24-hour notation.
 ** In addition, the “PM” suggests that it is a 12-hour time, so the expected range of values for the hour is 1 to 12, making the “25” even more nonsensical.
-* There are only 60 minutes in an hour, so “71” is too large of a minute.
+* There are only 60 minutes in an hour, so “71” is too large for a minute value.
 Apparently, though this date is nonsensical, the QA engineers have decided to make this date a celebration day. Probably since, as expressed in the comic, the software for keeping track of the date has crashed. Another interpretation of this comic could be how software always crashes in one form or another when being tested, and thus the nonsensical date implies that successful runs of software is never celebrated.

← Older revision		Revision as of 09:43, 22 July 2024
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	==Explanation==		==Explanation==
−	~~The upcoming holiday Megan is referring to could be Cartoonist Day, which is on May 5th (same day as Mexico's Cinco de Mayo). As a cartoonist himself, this may be Randall's way of celebrating it.~~
−
	Quality Assurance (QA) engineers are responsible for ensuring the quality of some product through the use of testing. In software, this process often involves entering bizarre and/or nonsense inputs in an attempt to break the software. Cueball, a QA engineer in this case, expresses concern that the scheduling system might crash. This could either be because as a QA engineer he is concerned about crashes in general, or that as a system used by QA engineers it likely has a lot of weird/invalid values that could cause a crash.		Quality Assurance (QA) engineers are responsible for ensuring the quality of some product through the use of testing. In software, this process often involves entering bizarre and/or nonsense inputs in an attempt to break the software. Cueball, a QA engineer in this case, expresses concern that the scheduling system might crash. This could either be because as a QA engineer he is concerned about crashes in general, or that as a system used by QA engineers it likely has a lot of weird/invalid values that could cause a crash.

@@ Line 44: / Line 44: @@
 * "24:00" can be used to unambiguously state the ''closing'' midnight of a given date. i.e. the same as "00:00" upon the next, but without the ambiguity as to which 'midnight' bookending of the given date it might refer to, e.g. for deadlines.
 ** It can be generally used to simplify the understanding of how much time is encompassed by a period starting at a pre-midnight time and ending at a post-midnight one.
-* Japan, in particular, [https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/16/7b/00/cd/proof-that-there-are.jpg uses] [https://preview.redd.it/qulk93jj2w731.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6b8a8abe10579156b853fff140f5f08dce7646f8 hour numbers] greater than 24 to express times past midnight but before sunrise. For example, 25:00 on a Friday is the same time as 1:00 the following Saturday. This is mainly used to express the starting times of midnight TV programming and the closing times of bars and other establishments open late at night. The hours usually go up to 27, but numbers up to 30 (6AM of the following day) are also seldom seen. It allows the timepoint to 'belong' to the normal working day that precedes it, rather than setting it prior to the normally expected start of business for the day after (especially when that involved weekends).
+* Japan, in particular, [https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/16/7b/00/cd/proof-that-there-are.jpg uses] [https://preview.redd.it/qulk93jj2w731.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6b8a8abe10579156b853fff140f5f08dce7646f8 hour numbers] greater than 24 to express times past midnight but before sunrise. For example, 25:00 on a Friday is the same time as 1:00 the following Saturday. This is mainly used to express the starting times of midnight TV programming and the closing times of bars and other establishments open late at night. The hours usually go up to 27, but numbers up to 30 (6AM of the following day) are also sometimes seen. It allows the timepoint to 'belong' to the normal working day that precedes it, rather than setting it prior to the normally expected start of business for the day after (especially when that involved weekends).
 ==Transcript==

@@ Line 30: / Line 30: @@
 In real life, such invalid dates would be rejected or coerced to be valid dates. Failing to account for invalid dates may result in errors, sometimes catastrophic, such as [https://www.theregister.com/2012/03/12/azure_leap_day_confirmed/ the February 29, 2012 Microsoft Azure outage] caused by the server trying to generate a certificate valid until February 29, 2013, a date that does not exist as 2013 being a non-leap year.
-Treatment of invalid dates varies by the chosen programming language and date-time library. Javascript, for example, would coerce January 0th into December 31st, and 25 o’clock into 1 o’clock the following day. While there is no way to directly create a Javascript Date object using 12-hour notation (because that requires text parsing, and the validation of the text input would just result in an invalid date), the following code snippet represents how far this correction can be abused:
+Treatment of invalid dates varies by the chosen programming language and date-time library. Javascript, for example, would coerce January 0th into December 31st, and 25 o’clock into 1 o’clock the following day. While there is no way to directly create a Javascript Date object using 12-hour notation (because that requires text parsing, and the validation of the text input would just result in an invalid date), the following code snippet represents how far this correction can be taken advantage of:
   // In Javascript, month 0 is January

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:52, 12 May 2024
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	==Explanation==		==Explanation==
−	{{incomplete\|Created by a NEGATIVE ONCE BOOKED EMPLOYEE OF SCAMAZON, BEING PAID EVERY 0 MONTHS - Please change this comment when editing this page. This explanation is far too long and should be better structured. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
−
	The upcoming holiday Megan is referring to could be Cartoonist Day, which is on May 5th (same day as Mexico's Cinco de Mayo). As a cartoonist himself, this may be Randall's way of celebrating it.		The upcoming holiday Megan is referring to could be Cartoonist Day, which is on May 5th (same day as Mexico's Cinco de Mayo). As a cartoonist himself, this may be Randall's way of celebrating it.

@@ Line 10: / Line 10: @@
 ==Explanation==
-{{incomplete|Created by a NEGATIVE ONCE BOOKED EMPLOYEE OF SCAMAZON, BEING PAID EVERY 0 MONTHS - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
+{{incomplete|Created by a NEGATIVE ONCE BOOKED EMPLOYEE OF SCAMAZON, BEING PAID EVERY 0 MONTHS - Please change this comment when editing this page. This explanation is far too long and should be better structured. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
 The upcoming holiday Megan is referring to could be Cartoonist Day, which is on May 5th (same day as Mexico's Cinco de Mayo).  As a cartoonist himself, this may be Randall's way of celebrating it.