Dozens of “temporarily out of stock” signs dot the shelves of some state liquor stores, and store managers say they’re not sure when their complete product line will again be available.
State officials blame the difficulties on a glitch in a new software system that controls the movement of 18,000 cases of liquor a day through the state’s distribution center on East Marginal Way South in Seattle.
The one thing that could possibly upset QA more than a defect is a defect that keeps QA from its liquor.
For his arduous duties include not merely the actual pleading, but also the intellectual task of preparing his cases. That is the reason why, in spite of all the recognition, pleasure, fame, and honor which their eloquence earns, so few men, now and in the past, have ever devoted themselves to the profession. All pleasures are banned; all amusements, sports, and festivities forbidden; even the joys of friendly conversation must seldom be indulged in. That is why men do not choose this kind of work, not because they lack the talent or the training.
When I make my religion called QAology (in my book Directornetics, natch), I am making Cicero a patron saint.
Also, I wish to remind you they killed him for being too good at his job and insisting that things be done right.
Here’s a good bit of exclamation from The Orator to include in your next project kickoff meeting:
”What can I say or wish, when all I wish for is ruined by your villainy?”
Bonus QA style points if you can get a project manager to shout that at you.
(An alternate translation, “What shall I say, what wishes dare I form, when your base actions frustrate all my prayers;” appears here, but I like the one which includes the word villainy better.)
Hey, it’s Monday, so let me remind you about the product launch meeting we’ve all attended, where we come with a laundry list of critical issues that should call for a delay but where the project management and customer account people are hellbent upon delivering a faulty product on time because they don’t expect the customer to try something basic which will crash the system.
Those product launch meetings are something like this, are they not?
A recent reader writes about his experience as new QA where none was before:
It seems like the longer the developers rely on me as their only real dedicated tester, the lazier they get.
Engine Developer: Now makes changes that impact every single portion of the program as if it’s nothing, then asks me to “TEST EVERYTHING!”
Web Front-End Developer: Routinely forgets to verify changes made across all of our supported browsers, introducing simple bugs he’d notice if he actually tested across all five that we support.
Java Developer: Changes the Java Web Start launch routine, and fails to test his change and notice that he broke it right before going on vacation.
That’s called risk compensation. It also explains why, although cars are getting safer with stasis fields and whatnot, people still die within them. They factor in the safety of having them, and then drive faster while drinking Red Bull, vodka, and whiskey (or whisky if you’re driving on the left side of the road).
When a bunch of developers who never had QA suddenly get a tester, they throw off the shackles of whatever sort of unit testing, compatibility testing, or feature testing they had done and just leave it to the poor besieged new guy. This approach, of course, means that this guy is doing part of the developers’ work in addition to SQA as it should be, and it also means that more crap will get through the net than would have if the developers had spent a minimum of time making sure that their work didn’t fail the most basic checks.
But I understand it takes a lot of developer brain cycles to RT a bon mot from another developer.
Coupled with the Twitter Fail Whale, these things make error pages cutesy. These little mascots remove the shame from their display, and personally, I am against it. Because you should feel bad when you see them, you should feel anger against the service provider who is letting you down. Where is the rage against a banana or a whale? It makes one sound petty.
Also, a little side note to the tr.im staff: You do not put a comma in a compound predicate with only two parts. Well, you do, but that’s because you’re wrong.
They’re far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland to spend their time learning the “boring” details of tech process, methodology, and tools–ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like. … [So] most Americans are just too expensive to train.
On the other hand multiple software developers have told me the horrors of outsourced code development in India- so many bugs and headaches that it’s probably just as cheap to develop the software in house.
I worked for a company that owned an offshore development group for which we resold services. We started using them for internal maintenance tasks, (i.e. not innovation, etc) and the quality of the work product was so poor we ended up taking that activity back. And this organization was CMM Level 5 certified!
I have yet to see a significant improvement in IT from ITIL, CMM, Six Sigma, etc. If you want lots of documentation they’re great, but improving quality and productivity? maybe not so much.
There’s a maxim somewhere in that about maybe all developers suck, but I can’t make anything pithy enough for my satisfaction to conclude this post.
It’s a bit technical for some QA people, but if you’re going to sit through a code review (I did. Once. And then code reviews were abandoned), these are the sorts of things you need to look for. Because every crazy test you would perform on a text box, you should demand they perform on each and every variable passed into a method. Werd.
The bar for writing excellence at this employer is very low.
There is a slight danger the subject matter experts will add exclamation points to manuals.
Personally, that many exclamation points in three sentences makes my teeth hurt, and the only remedy I have is to read the sentence in a Waynesworldian fashion, substituting NOT! for each exclamation point:
We are looking for a Tech Writer to join our team-NOT!
I get what they’re trying to do. If you have images disabled, that text would display telling you to enable image display. Which is all well and good, but:
The e-mail client is already prominently asking if you want to see the images, including a link or button to display them.
My e-mail clients block out the alt text, too, so I wouldn’t see that when the images didn’t display.
The text will make no sense to a person listening to a screen reader.
Either the interactive agency just phoned it in on creating a jpg equivalent for a Flash ad (although Flash enabled ads successfully rotated into the spot), or:
The ad rotating company helped out.
The interactive agency probably shared the image files with the client, and no client would have accepted that. Or should have. But if they sent it to the ad company, and the file was 10k too big, so someone decided to rush it and just compress it a little more….
I have seen this or similar things happen. When you deal with a third party delivery system, be it e-mail or banner ads, you need to review the final product of those companies’ tinkering to ensure they’re not screwing it up. Because they certainly can, and their QA processes are probably more lax than the interactive agency QA.
By the way, allow me to say it again: interactive agency QA. Because on the Google search for the term, QAHY comes in behind expired job postings for the term, and I think anyone looking for interactive agency QA could learn more by reading this blog than the Craigslist expired page. Hey, and if someone wanted to engage some experienced help, it’s TheDirector at this domain.
Many people ask me how I can take someone with little or no testing experience, although someone with some knowledge of computers and an eye for detail that they could have gotten while sewing, working in the printing industry, or just braying at every little mistake someone else makes, and turn that person into a Director kind of tester.
I’d like to say it’s just a gift, but to be honest, I had a little help in my youth from a seminal whitepaper in SQA training, available online here as PDF or here as HTML (no registration required).
At the end of the training, a trainee can do as I do (although not as well). And all of them have my face.
For a couple of days in May, coffee giant Starbucks ended up double charging about 1 million of their U.S. and Canadian customers.
More than 1 million transactions at 7,000 Starbucks locations on May 22 and May 23 were double billed
The one-million Starbuck transactions involved both credit and debit cards
The POS charges—and the receipts given to customers—were perfectly in order. The problems kicked in hours later, in the settlement processing area
Starbucks has declined to say how the glitch happened
Starbucks has declined to say how they plan to prevent it from happening again
Starbucks says they’ve had some customers call whose accounts were not fixed
Any customers with questions should contact the company’s customer relations hotline at 1-800-23-LATTE.
It’s best you not think how precursorily most monetary transactions are tested between the commerce system and the clearinghouse. I’ve delved into this on occasion, and the process of making that particular sausage doesn’t bother me, but the high number of rat hairs that are acceptable does.
Looks as though Sam G might have mistakenly expected us to enter FTP credentials to view the banner ad in the upper right corner. I have an idea: how about no?
This is the sort of thing that gave me nightmares when I was in interactive marketing: minor e-mail glitches that occur only in certain browser/site combinations.
Take, for example, the latest Nintendo e-mail. When received in a Hotmail box and viewed in IE, it looks like this:
