Issue #9 — “The Button That Worked Too Well”
Issue #9 — “The Button That Worked Too Well”
🌼 Lady Daisy Bug: A QA & Test Automation Digest with Personality
Welcome to Lady Daisy Bug — your new favorite corner of the internet where quality assurance meets charm, code, and character. Whether you’re debugging tests in the moonlight or strategizing a flawless regression suite before your first coffee, this newsletter’s for you.
I’m your host, Lady Daisy Bug — part test whisperer, part bug wrangler, and full-time believer in thoughtful testing. Each issue will blend bite-sized insights, automation tips, and a little QA storytelling to brighten your day (and your pipelines).
Let’s squash some bugs — and do it in style.
🌟 Bug of the Week: The Button That Worked Too Well
🕵️ Story:
Picture this: our checkout button was perfect. A bright, shiny call-to-action that worked flawlessly in staging. Too flawlessly.
Because when a user tapped it once, the backend thought they tapped it twice. Sometimes thrice. Cue duplicate orders, confused customers, and a finance team that suddenly had to process a lot of refunds.
🔍 Symptoms:
- Manual testing: tap looked fine (orders confirmed once).
- Automation testing: flaky. Sometimes 1 order, sometimes 2.
- Production logs: users weren’t double-clicking… the app was.
🧠 Root Cause:
The frontend event handler wasn’t properly debounced. On slower devices, the same tap gesture triggered multiple network calls before the first response came back.
🛠️ How I figured it out:
- Added extra logging to capture outbound requests.
- Replayed taps in slow-motion with Appium to simulate lag.
- Spotted two identical 𝙿𝙾𝚂𝚃 /𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚎𝚛 calls within milliseconds.
✅ Fix:
- Added a request lockout until the first order completed.
- Implemented a debounce on the click handler.
- Wrote a test to assert exactly one order per tap.
📌 Lesson: Not Every Bug is a Failure — Sometimes It’s an Overachiever
A button that doesn’t work is obvious. A button that works too much? Sneakier. It’s a reminder: test not just for failure, but for excess success.
🧪 Test Garden Tip: Simulate the Slow User
When testing interactions:
✅ Use Appium to introduce artificial delays in tap events.
✅ Inspect logs for duplicate network calls under poor conditions.
✅ Automate “exactly once” assertions for critical actions (checkout, payments, account changes).
Pro tip: Always test under laggy network profiles. The bugs hiding in latency are the ones your automation won’t find at full speed.
💬 Lady’s Log
“Too much of a good thing is still a bug.”
Sometimes, software isn’t lazy — it’s overeager. And just like overeager friends who RSVP “yes” to every invite, that enthusiasm eventually backfires.
— 𝓛𝓪𝓭𝔂 𝓓𝓪𝓲𝓼𝔂 𝓑𝓾𝓰 🐞🌼
📚 Petal Picks
- 🛒 “Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency” & “Because nobody likes being charged twice” — Stripe Blog
- 🐇 “Debouncing and Throttling Explained Through Examples” — David Corbacho
- 🛠 Tool of the Week: BrowseUp Proxy for simulating slow networks
💌 Coming Up Next
“The Scroll That Wouldn’t Stop”
Because sometimes inertia isn’t just in physics… it’s in your mobile UI.