No, I haven't got a job with The Colonel tasting his new recipes.

I have though found one of the problems that can happen when testing the same program for a while - repetition.

Not the boredom of seeing the same dialogs day after day but the problem that you can end up using the program the same way every time - when creating a user you always enter the address first and then their job and then you go to the next screen where they are assigned a function.

I realised I was doing this when I was doing some regression testing and followed the steps to reproduce and found a bug before I'd even got to testing the original bug. The steps to reproduce had me doing things in a different order than I'd got into the habit of doing.

The next realisation of this occurred when we had some customers in for a demonstration from the sales guys. The customers are well looked after and provided with a tasty lunch but they mustn't have been too hungry as there was some leftover for us to pick at.

Two chicken pieces on skewers in hand I went back to my testing - and with one hand holding the chicken I had to use the keyboard to drive the app under test and not the mouse..

and voila

a bug

Fortunately the bug was not in the chicken but in the code

So more learning experience for me:

1) vary the steps you take to test and I'll try to get another person involved as well to supply a fresh pair of eyes and approach to the tests

2) remember to include keyboard driven testing as part of the test plan

How do you get past the repetition problem ?