I went to a memorial for Elaine Ung today down in Cupertino. Elaine died suddenly late last month. She had worked as a tester for Apple for a number of years, and on the QuickTime team for last several years. During my time on QuickTime, I got to work with Elaine a lot. She was probably the best tester I've ever worked with, at Apple or at Microsoft. Her bugs had an amazing level of detail to them. And they were not ever wrong. The fastest way to silence an engineer protesting that a bug couldn't possibly be real was to point out that Elaine had written it.
Elaine was the only tester I've ever worked with that, if she had written in a bug that it happened "only between 1 and 3 AM during a full moon", you would just decide to come in at 1 AM during the next full moon so that you could reproduce and fix the bug.
Not only was Elaine the best tester at Apple, but she was also the best at anything that she had an interest in. Steven Jobs should take notice of the tremendous loss to Apple.
I will truly miss Elaine and my thoughts and prayers are with her family who mourn the loss of a daughter and sister and aunt.
Posted by: Earl on January 13, 2004 06:19 PMI still miss ELaine alot as do my parents. We recently celebrated her 50th birthday. She will always be in our hearts.
Posted by: Earl on June 25, 2005 07:22 AM