Issue #10 — “The Scroll That Wouldn’t Stop”
Issue #10 — “The Scroll That Wouldn’t Stop”
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Let’s squash some bugs — and do it in style.
🌟 Bug of the Week: The Scroll That Wouldn’t Stop
🕵️ Story:
I was running a set of automated tests on a mobile shopping app. I swiped down the product list, then expected the page to settle at the bottom.
Except it didn’t.
The list scrolled… and scrolled… and scrolled. Products repeated, content overlapped, and the app eventually crashed. I had discovered the infinite scroll loop from hell.
🔍 Symptoms:
- Manual swipe: sometimes stopped, sometimes jittered endlessly.
- Automation swipe (Appium): always triggered a runaway scroll.
- Logs: repeated calls to 𝙶𝙴𝚃 /𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚍𝚞𝚌𝚝𝚜?𝚙𝚊𝚐𝚎=𝟿𝟿𝟿𝟿…𝟷0000…𝟷000𝟷.
🧠 Root Cause:
A misconfigured “infinite scroll” API handler didn’t validate the 𝚙𝚊𝚐𝚎 parameter. When no new products were available, the backend happily returned the last page again and again. The frontend dutifully appended duplicates until memory gave up.
🛠️ How I figured it out:
- Ran Appium swipes with --𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚠-𝚒𝚘𝚜-𝚕𝚘𝚐 to monitor requests.
- Noticed repeating product IDs in API payloads.
- Set a breakpoint in dev tools: the frontend never broke the loop because 𝚑𝚊𝚜𝙼𝚘𝚛𝚎 was always 𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚎.
✅ Fix:
- Backend: return 𝚑𝚊𝚜𝙼𝚘𝚛𝚎=𝚏𝚊𝚕𝚜𝚎 once the last page was reached.
- Frontend: add a client-side guard to stop when duplicates detected.
- Tests: validate both “scroll continues” and “scroll stops gracefully.”
📌 Lesson: Motion Without Boundaries is Chaos
In life and in testing, momentum’s good… until it isn’t. Infinite scroll is powerful, but without clear end conditions, it turns into infinite fall.
🧪 Test Garden Tip: Assert the End of the List
When testing scrollable UIs:
- ✅ Check that the scroll eventually stops.
- ✅ Assert for “no duplicate content” at the bottom.
- ✅ Use network mocks to simulate empty data responses.
- ✅ Add a memory usage check for runaway loops.
Bonus: Appium’s 𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚘𝚕𝚕𝙸𝚗𝚝𝚘𝚅𝚒𝚎𝚠 can help test boundaries — just don’t forget to assert the “last visible element”.
💬 Lady’s Log
“Test endings as carefully as beginnings.”
Every scroll, loop, and retry must know when to bow out. Because sometimes the hardest bug to find isn’t the missing start — it’s the missing finish line.
— 𝓛𝓪𝓭𝔂 𝓓𝓪𝓲𝓼𝔂 𝓑𝓾𝓰 🐞🌼
📚 Petal Picks
- 📱 “Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It” — Nielsen Norman Group
- 🪞 “Visual Testing Made Easy (Percy Walkthrough 2025)” — Automation Guild
- 🔧 Tool: Charles Proxy to replay API responses for scroll edge-cases
💌 Next Issue Teaser:
“The Alert That Froze the Suite”
Because nothing makes automation sweat like a modal that just… won’t go away.