A Bug

Hi Visitors,

In this post I will describe about a bug in messenger software I am using. This software is popular, common and widely used messenger software. Yes I am talking about AOL Instant Messenger and a bug I found in it.

Last week me and my colleague Shoukath was chatting on some testing topics through AOL Instant Messenger. Because of some technical problems our internet connection went down and I was told that it might take another 15 minutes to bring it up. So I decided to test the product I am currently using. And I started testing AIM.

In the login window of AIM I entered my username and password and pressed down enter key for a few seconds. Oh God! What is happening? The AIM window just vanished. And I tried to re-open it again by clicking the AIM icon on my desktop. Nothing happened. The window was not opening. It just crashed. Then I took Windows Task Manager and closed the aim.exe application and clicked on the AIM icon on my desktop again. Now it opened the window. I was excited by this finding and tried to reproduce it again. Yes it occurred again. The percentage of reproducibility of that bug is 100.

My Report on the Bug

Product Information:
Name: AOL Instant Messenger
Version: 5.9.6089

System Information:
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional [Version 5.00.2195]
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.66 GHz

Title: Holding down enter key for a few seconds from login screen is crashing AIM

Steps to Reproduce:
1) Download and Install AIM 5.9.6089
2) In the login window give your username and password
3) Hold down the enter key for a few seconds (20-60 Seconds)

Result: AOL Instant Messenger Crashes.

After this I checked the AIM Website for latest version of their IM Software and downloaded the latest version (AIM: 6.0.28.1). I checked for that bug. But this time I didn’t find that bug. They have fixed it in the new version. Great! But still I wonder about that bug. I can coin only two chances for the presence of that bug in the product. One is they really missed the bug or other is they already know about this bug and may be because of some other constraints they released the product with the bug. Any way the bug is present in the AIM Version: 5.9.6089 and that is still available for download as Classic AIM 5.9 from their site.

I don’t know weather some one already had reported this bug or not. I posted this in my blog because I feel it’s worth sharing this information to all my visitors.

Thanks
Nishanth Balachandran.