Trial is expired - Really?

On 14th Feb logged into into 99tests.com and realized that there was a contest happening which I guess failed to notice in my mail. So when I wanted to register for the contest the maximum testers limit had already been reached still I liked the application and was eager to give a shot and started to test the application. We had to download a trial version and while doing it I released that I had the tool already installed in my PC and on further looking in the tool I came to know that the trial period had expired way before.

So, the next challenge immediately that came to my mind was to test the behavior of the application after its trial period expired :)

Started exploring the application and noted down few interesting bugs.

These are some bugs that I found :

1. Click the exe (BrowseEmAll.exe)
- it is displaying the welcome message with the Expired message and three buttons (Continue,Buy Now and Enter License)

Observation : Why should it display the text "Please select 'continue' to begin" when the product has expired.
It can check first for the product license and then decide to display which text to be.

2. Click Enter license,As I dont have valid license - provided some random input

and clicked submit.It says

Questions

 - it clearly says that key is invalid, then why it is expecting user to perform one more step

3. Now click ok to export the file and click Export (Intention is to check what is the file it actually export)

4. It is opening the save as dialog box in which there is a new XML generated.

  - Now it is time to check what are all the details in xml?

and the XML is

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Surety xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Keyset>Surety</Keyset>
  <InstallGuid>00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000</InstallGuid>
  <InstallKey />
  <Version>none</Version>
  <InstallIdentifiers>
    <InstallIdentifier>
      <IdentifierType>MachineName</IdentifierType>
      <HashedValue>qWASGhm2XM/+Efb9duyjFst3hlMsq5qNqKqBchoalpI=</HashedValue>
    </InstallIdentifier>
  </InstallIdentifiers>
  <ValidationStatus>false</ValidationStatus>
</Surety>


  - and workaround with the dialog box buttons save and cancel

5. For both the actions save and cancel it says File successfully created, and the word successfully misspelled here

6. Okay now tried with different steps, lets close the window (Welcome to BrowsEmAll), WOW!..What a surprise closing that is opening the app and i can still use the application after my trial period expiration. Yes it is allowing me to do testing!!

Culprit can be exist at any form :)

As part of my new project I had a chance to work on a flash application. While testing out on various browsers for few days, all of a sudden the flash content did not load in Firefox.

I did check in other systems having similar OS and Browser versions. I also checked for

1. Flash player version.

2. Other versions of Firefox.

3. Different OS,Browsers (In some combination the flash content did work and for some the it did not load).

After few days while having a chat with Ajay, I came to know about a site to find existence of flash player and its version. Using that tool I checked in all the browsers and got the message "Flash is available" other than Firefox. So Started to explore more on it and decided that I should make the flash content load in Firefox.

1. In the site ,While installing flash player I was directed to step 4.

2. I navigated to step 4 and came across a sentence which read "If you have issues with Flash Player 11.3 on Mozilla Firefox, see Issues" (My Firefox version was 17.0).

3. I Clicked on the "See Issues" link and in that page saw the text "Rich media content doesn't appear if Real Player is installed"

Crap !..i just installed real player some days ago, and that was the reason why my flash content did not open up suddenly. 

Lesson learnt : The culprit can be at any form, finding it using right tools, and exploring more will make job easier.