Time, Time, Time, See What You've Done To Me
Today I found and argued about and isolated many bugs on one topic alone. Time.
Testing tools used:
1 calculator (free with Windows AND Mac operating systems)
System Event Viewer and Advanced time control panel for Windows.
Problems:
Times listed in steps did not add up to the "overall duration" ever. We are missing some time.
Client time is used for some calculations causing things to happen in negative time for some time zones.
The "time" server lied making things happen in the far future for negative time.
Some time is in GST and some is not which is problematic.
Good Things:
Time is always tracked in seconds (yay), so the displays in various ways all work.
Date last modified is shown and consistent.
Questions: What else should I ask myself and find out about time overall? Are there other tools which can help me test time I should look into? What interesting time related issues have you found?
In short, I missed my bus, am behind on other tests, and still I am interested to see if this software can stand the test of time. Yes, pun intended.
Testing tools used:
1 calculator (free with Windows AND Mac operating systems)
System Event Viewer and Advanced time control panel for Windows.
Problems:
Times listed in steps did not add up to the "overall duration" ever. We are missing some time.
Client time is used for some calculations causing things to happen in negative time for some time zones.
The "time" server lied making things happen in the far future for negative time.
Some time is in GST and some is not which is problematic.
Good Things:
Time is always tracked in seconds (yay), so the displays in various ways all work.
Date last modified is shown and consistent.
Questions: What else should I ask myself and find out about time overall? Are there other tools which can help me test time I should look into? What interesting time related issues have you found?
In short, I missed my bus, am behind on other tests, and still I am interested to see if this software can stand the test of time. Yes, pun intended.
How about a few more exploration items, like (1) operation which occurs during a leap second (see http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html) for the definition of a leap second or (2) operation which occurs during the hour after the fall DST time change ("fall back"). I was a little surprised when one of my automated tests failed during that "fall back" because there were two different time_t values for the same second
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Possibly relevant thoughts:
- DST happens "backwards" in the southern hemisphere.
- Are seconds granular enough for your problem space?
- For large spans of time, watch out for the inaccuracies of floating point math.
- If time is displayed in larger units, is there agreement on these terms? (day = 24 hrs or 8 hrs?)
- I once saw a product address the Y2K bug by moving it 50 years -- 12/31/2050 + 1 = 1/1/1950
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