We were working on a browser upgrade project. The company plans to do a browser upgrade to the latest version (we will call it browser A). A list was created for all the items that we were supposed to go through. And we went through this checklist for an in-house financial application that calculates some financial data and generates reports for managers to their higher-ups. It’s not really categorized as GMP related, but it’s got high visibility.

Project Meeting

So a meeting was held and there are several testers and validation engineers gathered in the room. And I suggest one person would do the entire activities on browser B, the default browser which the application was developed upon, and another do it on browser A. Long story short, we went through all the activities and compare results. Each tester does it on his/her own laptop for the two browsers, and everything looked fine.

Printing Functionality

There was only one thing left on the list: printing. Sounds extremely easy thing to do right? How could that go wrong? But wait. I remembered I read a horrible story before, that a certain brand printer after software upgrade, did not print properly. e.g. the printout will show the number 4 as 6. Coding error. Really shocking. So normally people will look at this item and say, of course it will print, how can it not print under the browser?

Do the Reports Match Up

Actually it’s more than that. I asked them to each print the report. And I picked up the printouts and COMPARED them! The header and footer looked slightly different, font size and location. But that’s not the whole story, the calculated results are different! Amazing! We tried the same thing again. Identical inputs, operations, we even rebooted the laptops to make sure nothing in the cache is interfering with the calculations.

And they still did not match! Never expected this. We reported this to the software developers, who later discovered that the java engine behind browser A was not storing data properly.

The Takeaway

It was finally decided that the application will remain operating under browser B only. I am happy we did not miss this. Otherwise the incorrect report will be frowned upon unfavorably by the management. Who knows, some bad decision could have been made because of that. Moral of the story, as a validation engineer, do not take anything for granted.