In Win95 days we would often send a link to bugs in the dB in an attempt to avoid duplicate entries, and to also share clever attack patterns that other testers might try in their feature area. In retrospect this didn’t change the percentage of duplicate entries.

The manager thing is funny. A guy in the office next to me sent me a piece of mail one day with a question. I replied to his question, then he responded with several more questions. So, I got up and stuck my head around the corner and told him it would be faster to discuss the answers to his questions versus taking the time to write everything in an email. He said he did have the time to discuss them, but wanted to read my answers to his questions on his bus ride home. Three days later he stopped by my office and said he was still waiting on my response. I told him I was still working on the response and that I only had time to type one word a day, but if he’d like to take 15 minutes and sit down I could probably answer his questions and any follow on questions about the subject he might have.

He sat down and after about 15 minutes left with the information he was seeking.

Monday, May 12, 2008 9:10 PM by I.M.Testy

Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I’m a software tester who is suffering from my team’s love affair with email. I disabled my email pop-up notifications in an effort to stay focused and now my manager constantly stops by my cube asking, “did you get my email?”.

I wrote a recent blog post…

http://www.testthisblog.com/2008/04/sick-of-chaos.html

…about my team’s twisted habit of reporting bugs via email instead of logging bugs in the bug DB.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008 6:25 PM by ejacobson