Life in the fast lane of web development usually includes rapid cycles of development, deployment, and test. Cache is the monkey-wrench to this fine tuned machine because of the mysterious way that the browser locally stores files that would otherwise be served fresh off the server
I don't know how many times I've found a really good bug and excitedly reported it to the erstwhile developer only to have them say "Hmm, that's odd. Doesn't happen for me. Try clearing your cache." More often than not, this makes the bug go away, and makes me want to shoot myself.
The real problem is, testers are not the only ones that have cache. Users do too. And users don't tend to feel the joy of bugs likes testers do. What can be done? For one, you can ask your users to clear their cache. We just did that on our blog to help ensure our users and ourselves that our product is not to blame for issues some people are seeing in Firefox.
That is not the most elegant of solutions. It is better to find and fix these issues before a user ever sees them. So, when you find a bug that is caused by something being cached or not cached as expected, clearing your cache to make the bug go away is not enough. You need to go the next step of figuring out in what scenarios caching is causing trouble, then working with development to make them understand the situation, and improving the code to deal with it.
Because of the nebulous nature of how browsers handle cache, tackling these problems can be like driving into a wall at 65 MPH, but such is our role as testers. Better us than the users.
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