Eric finally pays me a visit at 11:00.

"They sorted out your authorization to the server. Congratulations, you can now submit bugs."

"About time."

He walks toward my computer and sits down as if he owns the place.

I tell Lily to wait on the sofa while I join Eric in front of the computer. After inserting my silver card into the keyboard and quickly typing my birthday as the password - the desktop shows up.

"Here it is."

Eric navigates the mouse toward an application with the icon of a robotic arm and boots it up.

"You have two important tabs here, Tasks and Bugs."

The mouse hovers over the two labels, explaining them in order.

"In Tasks you'll find tasks assigned to you, as well as tasks which you assigned to others. In Bugs you'll find all the bugs that you opened."

I nod in understatement to his words.

There aren’t any tasks open on me right now, since there's no “real” boss to assign me any. In the future it will probably be stuff like “Test this” and “Test that”.

Ignoring the “Tasks” screen, Eric immediately enters into “Bugs”. Though he looks calm on the outside, I can sense the rush in his hand movements; he must be in a hurry for a meeting or such.

"I'm not too familiar with the interface for opening bugs, as I'm always on the receiving end of those. But we'll figure it out."

He clicks on "New" and a popup window is prompted. The window contains multiple text boxes, with "Title" and "Description" being the most noticeable.

"Here, let’s submit something and see what happens."

He brings both the keyboard and the mouse toward me.

So this is it.

Finally, I can do my job and flood the system with bug reports. Muhahaha!

Though, now that I'm in front of the screen and Eric is eying me - I have a blackout.

"Just report anything, no matter how trivial."

He tries to rush me. He’s definitely in a hurry, so it feels uncomfortable to keep him hanging.

"Let’s see... There's the case of her absurd weight, but the user manual already admits it as a known issue."

"It definitely has been submitted many times by now. But no matter, one more submission won't harm anybody."

He smiles irresponsibly, as if motivating me to prank someone.

"... isn't it bad having duplicates in the system?"

"Don't sweat the little details."

As a guy who should be constantly bombarded by bugs, I expected Eric to hate duplicated bugs with passion. It's irritating when you fix a bug, only for someone to mistakenly claim that it's still there.

But if he has no problem with it, neither do I.

I’m tempted to type “Absurd Kid Weight!!!” as the bug’s title, but it’s important to have a businesslike conduct even if it’s boring.

The title I decide on is “Overweight for a Kid Model”. In the description textbox I summarize the problem simply and objectively. There’s no much to write, she’s just too damn heavy.

“What do you think I should write here?”

I point at the “How to reproduce” section. The purpose of the textbox is clear, I need to detail how to reproduce the bug. But in this case...

“Just make them lift it, heh.”

Eric shrugs while chuckling.

“Yeah... that’s one way to go about it.”

I murmur as I recall the first time I tried to raise Lily from the bed, naively following Eric’s instructions.

With “How to reproduce” finished, the “Expected behaviour” and “Actual behaviour” sections are easy to fill in.

Expected: Light as a feather.

Actual: Heavy as a tank.

Of course, both are phrased more elegantly and businesslike on the form.

Next, I hover over the “Product” dropdown box to choose the specific product for which this bug is relevant. It will be fairly challenging to find Lily’s model among all of Anomalia’s products... or so I thought.

As soon as I click on the box, it opens only three suggestions: “Tsundere-Chan Model”, “Tsundere-Chan Remote” and “Tsundere-Chan Pod”. There’s also a serial code beside each name, but I ignore those.

Eric briefly explains that the system filters out Anomalia products which are irrelevant for me. Makes sense, I shouldn’t have the option to report bugs on products which I haven’t even seen.

The remaining obligatory fields are “Severity” and “Priority”.

“I trust you know what they mean.”

“Yeah, though I also know that their precise definition changes depending on the workplace.”

At least, that’s what I discovered while googling QA related subjects for job interviews. With that in mind, I tell him how my previous job used to treat these important fields.

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“Severity was a way to gauge how critical the bug is to the general functioning of the product, whereas Priority stated how important it was to fix the bug in the immediate future.”

Down to it: Severity was overshadowed by Priority most of the time. The developers prioritized fixing whatever the higher ups set as the highest priority, even if these bugs weren’t fatal to the product in term of functionality.

“It’s the same here. Submit based on that line of reasoning.”

Eric nods in approval to my explanation.

“Should I submit the Priority as well? Shouldn’t someone from above decide something like that?”

“Yes, in most cases the higher ups will have the final saying. Treat your submissions as ‘advice’ on that front.”

In term of Severity, the design flaw of Lily’s weight doesn’t hinder the system much. Being super heavy doesn’t cause software crashes, freezes, data loss or anything critical.

Therefore, I report it as Severity 4. This is the highest numeric value for the field, which makes it the LEAST severe possible.

As for Priority, I slap it a proper Priority 1 - a “critical” priority.

While Lily’s weight doesn’t cause technical errors in her functions, it’s bound to disappoint and challenge many consumers. Thus, it has a critical importance in term of business value.

Once done, the final logical step should be assigning the bug to some developer. After all, someone gotta fix it.

Yet, I can’t find such a field anywhere.

“Don’t I need to assign it to someone?”

“Do you have any idea to whom this should be directed?”

“Not really...”

“Me neither.”

Eric shrugs with a carefree smile.

“Then I just leave the bug hanging in the air?”

“Don’t worry about that part, it’d work itself out.”

“If you say so...”

Still shrouded in doubt, I hover over the “Submit” button and turn to Eric. He nods in approval and I hit the button.

After a short loading - the submission form disappears. A small message appears at the bottom of the screen: “Successfully Submitted.”

“Here you can see the bugs related to you.”

Eric points at the left side of the screen.

“The current status of the bug is here.”

He points at the word “Queued”.

“Queued...? For what?”

“Everything you submit will pass by the Sweeper, right now it’s queued for being examined.”

“Sweeper...?”

“Oh, right. I forgot that this is unique to Anomalia.”

He scratches his head with an awkward smile. As always, he’s good at forgetting the important details.

“The company is big and the products are complicated,  so Anomalia decided to use its capabilities to craft a sorting AI - the Sweeper. It goes over every task and bug submitted into the server and analyzes them.”

This is rather revolutionary; I don’t think such technology exists anywhere else in the present.

“The Sweeper finds the right person to assign the bug to, without the submitter lifting a finger. It also knows how to spot duplicates of the same bug and to reject them. ”

This explains why Eric wasn’t worried about opening a bug which definitely already exists. The system will just sweep it away as a duplicate!

... wait, does that mean all the effort I put into this report was be for naught? Eric! You troll!!

“When a bug is fixed and closed, the Sweeper converts it into a task and sends it to the relevant QA department for testing.”

If it works as well as he describes it, this technology saves lots of trouble for both QA and developers.

“Now you pretty much know everything you need, the rest is up to you.”

Eric jumps on his feet and starts heading toward the exit. I also stand up and follow him outside.

“I’ll be very busy for the rest of the day, it’s likely we’ll only meet again next week.”

“Oh, right...”

It’s already Friday, which means weekend is just around the corner.

“For today, try submitting some bugs to the server, see how the Sweeper responds.”

“Is there anything specific you’d like me to test?”

“I’m already drowning in confirmed bugs and I have to release a new build version today. I’d rather not add more trouble to my plate.”

“Heh, got it.”

We part ways and Eric heads to his office. I step back into the office and use my card to close the door behind me.

He confirmed that he’ll be too busy to pay me another visit today. Which means... I can safely bring out the Lego for Lily!