Story type: Tester actually did it

Our payment stub approved every transaction. It approved expired cards. It approved negative amounts. It approved a card number containing the word banana. UAT described the payment journey as extremely reliable.

The CI pipeline ran 1,204 automated tests in nineteen seconds. Everyone celebrated. Then we noticed the command was listing the tests rather than executing them.

The release manager asked me to run the smoke pack. I found four folders: SmokeSmoke_NewSmoke_FinalSmoke_Final_UseThisOne I chose badly.

The tester raised a critical defect because my API returned a 404 for a customer who did not exist. I explained that this was the correct response. He reopened it and wrote: “Customer still does not exist.”

Stand-up update: “Still testing.” That was my update for nine working days. I was actually stuck on the same broken environment and had given up explaining it.

Our automated regression suite had 612 tests. About 200 failed every day. Nobody knew why, so we ignored those. Another 150 were switched off. The remaining tests checked that the login page loaded. Management loved the dashboard because it said 96% passed.

I spent nearly an hour logging a defect because the Save button had disappeared. I added screenshots. I checked three browsers. I restarted everything. Then someone asked me to scroll down. The Save button was at the bottom of the page. I quietly deleted the defect and went for lunch.

I once wrote a test case that said: “Check the page works correctly.” That was the whole test case. No steps. No expected result. No shame.