This happened back when I had first started my career as a QA. I was working on a mobile app. One feature of the app that we were testing was that swear words were not allowed.

The app was for an external company, so in their Requirements they had written that the app should not accept swear words in any fields and had given some pretty tame examples.

The Tester from the external company had mentioned in the requirement that we should enter swear words. On a previous occasion he had even done so.

The Test Lead was busy, so I went ahead and tested this. I added the swear words from the list, and they all got added. That’s strange. So I added more swear words to other fields and even added some other lesser known swear words. I even made some rhyme (think Duck and Shore). Everything got accepted and the articles I had made got published to the test environment. I panicked a bit as it occurred to me that what I had done was probably NSFW, so I walked over to see the lead Android developer. I explained the situation and asked him if I could access the database to remove the entries with swear words. He laughed and said “no, only the external company can access the DB”.

I thought for a bit and then decided that as it’s definitely not production, what’s the worst that can happen. I logged a bug, made the screenshots SFW, had a laugh with a Project Manager about how this app accepted some pretty blue language but it wasn’t supposed to, and moved on to testing another story.

45 minutes later, the CEO comes storming out of a meeting and rushes over to the Testing area. He was fuming and growled to both me and the Test Lead to come into the empty meeting room. The CTO follows both of us in, smiling and shaking his head. Uhoh. All the blood drains from my colleague’s face. I started to feel sick. We were both in trouble for something.

It turns out the CTO, CEO and Design Team had been in a meeting with the bosses of the company that this app was for and had been proudly demonstrating their designs. Then my article popped up with the swear words in every field. A whole page of single word obscenities in almost every input field and thanks to predictive text, there were even a few rhyming swear words. Apparently one of the Project Managers actually read out the words without properly reading them first and one girl even screamed and was in tears.

The CEO was in a rage and as soon as he had finished venting, my colleague - who had absolutely no clue about this - tried to take the blame. I knew it was all my fault. I was near the end of my 3 month contract for them too, and I thought my contract would be terminated. I decided that the only thing to do was to own up straight away and took full responsibility, but explained my side of the story; this was a requirement from their business, so I was just testing this. The CEO was still really angry that this happened. The CTO could understand my point of view.

I was reminded of a few things that day:

1. Don’t let someone else take the blame for something that you have done. After the CTO and CEO had realised what I had done, they acted professionally and calmly and didn’t treat me like a delinquent child entering swear words all over the place for fun. This is how I expect good leaders to behave,
2. And never, ever during testing enter anything that can be deemed offensive into something that can potentially be viewed by anyone,
3. Before doing anything that even has the slightest chance of going wrong, always make sure that something can be rolled back/reset,
4. If you think it’s probably Not Safe For Work and you’re at Work, it’s definitely NSFW.

My contract eventually got extended a few times while I was there too and it ended up being one of the better places I’ve worked at.