A while ago I tested a feature to create, publish and read ads. Standard feature. A form for creating the ad, a page for administration and a page for reading and filtering the created ads.

After the regular bugfixes and hassle the feature was published in our test environment and seemed to be working fine, as expected. Ads were created and could be read with no problem. The feature took a few hours of testing before it was time to move on.

I had missed one thing.

The day after my tests, all ads had vanished. Noone had done anything except for this one guy; webcrawler.
It turned out that the link on the administrationpage to delete an ad was just that, a link. Webcrawlers are programmed to follow links.

So what I did miss in my testing was a lifetime test; which factors will affect the ad during it’s entire life span?
Now I might just have learned something.