Piñata: When the candy starts cascading from a piñata, we typically stop whacking it. If we see something reasonably spectacular when we’re testing—a crash or hang, screen or data corruption, behavior that we can’t understand or explain—we might believe that we've found a problem that’s dramatic enough to justify stopping. Might there be an interesting piece of candy still stuck in the piñata?This poses an interesting situation. Some testers may whack the piñata, see the candy fall out and stop. Other may perhaps give it a few more whacks for good measure to tease out the remaining candy and stop there. Myself? I don't stop.
In fact the last time I actually touched a piñata was at a neighbor's house for their sons 7th birthday. The attending kids (in order of smallest to biggest, of course) took their turns with the stick and the eventual, inevitable avalanche of confectionary guts spilled out. The children pounced upon the sugary pile like rabid weasels, happily scooping the booty into little baggies with their names on them.
Myself? I waited until the carnage had passed. And there, laying on the ground in 2 pieces was the piñata. I gathered them up and proceeded to take it apart, wanting to see exactly how the artisan who created the thing was able to take a single piece of cardboard and fold it origami-like into a donkey. Or was it an elephant? No matter.
The point here is that as a tester, I find myself not stopping when logic may dictate I should stop. I want to keep going - to understand why the piñata broke the way it did, learning and answering questions along the way.
-William
