Google Toilet Culture: Testing Programs on the Toilet

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Google's toilets are famous not only for their high-tech content, but also because they have been used to ensure that Google's products are flawless since 2006. This is a corporate culture that internal employees call "testing on the toilet."

In the early years, there were media reports that the modern toilets at Google's California headquarters could not provide full-scale washing and drying. Employees can sit on heated toilet seats to rest and relax. Perhaps it is because the toilets are too comfortable that Google employees will use them for other things.

According to past and current Google software engineers, the company is keen on software testing to ensure that the software functions as they envisioned. A group of passionate test engineers who call themselves the "Google Test Team" came up with a strange way to test software and promoted it to the entire company. They wrote program test questions to train employees to find problems in the software, printed out the test questions, and posted them in the cubicles of all of Google's approximately 500 toilets. This "toilet testing" tradition has been preserved to this day.

In 2007, they published an article on their blog encouraging programmers around the world to do the same. The article reads:

We make "Toilet Testing" public: these are our tips to inspire developers to write high-quality code.

The list contains a variety of content, is posted in all the toilet cubicles of Google, and is updated regularly. Of course, this approach has also received a lot of feedback, some people think "this is a great approach", and some people say "I just want to go to the bathroom, can you leave me alone?"

Some Google employees like this practice so much that they keep it after changing jobs.

Edmond Lau, a former Google employee, said that every week a group of Google employees would post a test of the week in all toilet cubicles, with different questions. The "toilet test" provides engineers with a quirky and fun way to keep their minds on work while they are doing their own things. It also shows a point in Google's engineering culture: maintaining the most detailed testing and the most rigorous attitude towards major engineering organization projects.

Perhaps the moral of this story is: if you want to attract someone's attention, hold on to their pants. However, will you really not get constipated if you think about other things while using the toilet?

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