The Five Key Myths About HTML5 contains a lot of insight into market penetration and tipping points regarding new technologies, including browser market share and Flash version penetration.
There’s a tipping point where a technology reaches enough users to be worthwhile for designers and developers to use; however, the thesis is that HTML5 isn’t there yet.
But you can apply the lessons from the article to other technologies your organization might want to use.
On a recent Monday morning, inside an unremarkable, low-slung building in Yonkers, N.Y., blue-coated technicians conducted lab work. Among their calibrated tools: Cheez Whiz, pig’s blood and Maine coon cat hair.
They’re testers for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and website whose ratings drive spending decisions on some 3,000 product models annually, from vacuums and lawn mowers to strollers, shower heads and smoothies.
That’s some boundary analysis I wish I could try.
In the lab, technicians are always developing ways to accelerate the wear and tear products normally experience over the course of years. Treadmills, for instance, get pounded repeatedly with a spinning metal drum imbedded with rubber green balls that mimic running feet. (The device’s nickname: Johnnie Walker.) Stainless-steel grills are stationed in a conditioning chamber and pelted with a salty spray to test for rust potential. Sometimes the goal is to mimic extreme scenarios, like an accident, in which bicycle helmets get strapped on a metal head form and dropped from various heights onto sharp and rounded objects.
I try to apply that same sort of creativity when I face an application.
Meanwhile, do you suppose mechanical engineers around the world post comments on the Consumer Reports Web site about how no one would do that? Probably not, because unlike software “engineers,” mechanical engineers have a sense of shame.
Patriot Coal Corp. was found in contempt of court by a federal judge on Wednesday and ordered to clean up selenium pollution at two mines in West Virginia.
I guess that’s not something a tester is going to do necessarily, but I don’t think it’s effective branding for the automated testing product.
Some developers will make the case that the last one refers to the Your Birthdate field, but it’s still weird to read.
I’d like to point out that I did not have to troll a bunch of contests to find these three examples. This is three out of five I visited. In 60% of the Web sites I visited, the error messages contained misspellings and other problems (such as poor placement in the last case).
A user who encounters an error and then encounters your error message, if your error message is rife with misspellings or other problems, the user might think that the error was the fault of your crappy application and not his or her problem.
So you need to pay attention to your error messaging and display as much as any other feature of your application. Because if your error message isn’t part of the solution (that is, helping the user understand what’s wrong and how to fix it), it’s part of the problem.
If you are writing consumer software you have to understand that you and your average user have a very different level of understanding of computers. When you first start doing support it can be a shock to realize just how vast this gulf is. It doesn’t mean that your users are stupid, just that they haven’t spent the thousands of hours in front of a computer that you have.
This echoes the Roberta scenario that I outlined earlier. When your development staff and design staff get together to design something, they need to remember that not everycat is as hep as they are, dig? Complication, and deviation from other interface standards, will induce user error, and the worst bugs of all are the bugged users.
So your designers have constrained the input length on your application so you cannot enter more characters than the database can handle. If the developers force the string into all caps, have I got a nasty little trick for you. Ladies and gentlemen, the German eszett:
Also, the eszett or scharfes S (ß) is used. It exists only in a lowercase version since it can never occur at the beginning of a word (there are a few loan words starting with an s followed by a z (e.g. Szegediner Krautfleisch but that is not the same as the eszett which counts as one letter).
In all caps it is converted to SS….
There’s a new unicode symbol for the capital version, but a lot of old applications will still force that into an SS. So a word like confuße might get uppercased to CONFUSSE, and if you set the string to the maxlength, uppercasing it will blow that up.
To be honest, I did discover this when I was working on an application for a German customer and I (and only I of a team of far more seasoned QA people than I at the time) sought out the German alphabet to learn its vagaries.
I just ruined a little of my mystique, didn’t I?
However, if your application might possibly be localized to German, you have my permission to use this. Use this new power only for good. Strangely, though, QA good means evil to everyone else, but that’s not our fault.
A Michigan company announced the release of software Tuesday that introduces new punctuation to the typed word: The sarcasm mark.
Sarcasm Inc. of Washington Township said the SarcMark, which resembles an open circle with a dot in the center, can be installed on computers via a program that can be downloaded from sarcmark.com for $1.99.
It’s almost worth $1.99 just for how much it will annoy your developers.
I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.
If you can shout at the devil, you can certainly convince that developer that a blue screen probably is a critical defect and not a medium, fix-if-we-have-time priority.
I’ve recently engaged to do some load testing oversight, and as such, this required some different asterisks for my estimate than my regular functional testing estimates. Some are applicable to load testing in general, but some are specific to the role I’ve taken as sort of a project manager wielding a prod over a third company that will provide the actual scripting and running of the tests.
Here are the asterisks I came up with, the torpedoes that could sink the project or, at the very least, the estimate:
Problems with the environment or application require additional work. If the testing environment is not configured correctly or does not mirror the anticipated production environment, the load tests might require additional starting/stopping and run times.
Functional defects impede test scripts. If the test scripts encounter functional defects, the load tests might require additional iterations after defects have been corrected.
Functional workflow remains the same between load tests. This estimate anticipates that corrections to any defects/load issues found will not require refactoring or rewriting the test scripts. If the application changes in such a fashion, the test team will need additional time to adjust and retest the scripts.
Communication between test liaison and test vendor runs smoothly.
What other factors would you add to this list? Why do I bother with these open-ended questions? Because I just like the sound of my own keyboard clicking (yeah, it’s an old school keyboard).
A quote in the back of a Baseline magazine got me to thinking.
When asked to characterize their ability to thwart internal breaches, only 34% of respondents are ‘very confident,’ but that response rises to 56 percent [sic] when respondents are asked about their ability to thwart external breaches. – Deloitte’s 2010 Financial Services Security Survey
Frankly, in the QAHY school of QA philosophy, any confidence is overconfidence. If you think you’re catching the bugs and are ready to open the bar, you’re probably missing something, and it’s not going to miss you.
I could do actual work for you, and I get to include that on my resume? Let me think about that. Sounds about as much fun as testing an open source project, except with the knowledge that you’re making money from my servitude.
I just have to ask you one question: if you’re hiring experienced tester who are working for free even though you’re paying for it, what sort of service do you think you’re getting?
I’m really starting to fall out of love with Firefox. It’s becoming a resources hog, makes coming out of hibernation take a long time, and constantly doesn’t play nice with Flash these days. Additionally, I get this particular condition frequently:
This occurs if you have a large number of tabs open, taxing the browser, and then you use the keyboard to open the Bookmark menu (ALT, then B, then down arrow to start moving down it). Sometimes, it throws open the file menu and then leaves it open when you expose the Bookmarks menu.
On a severity scale, this is a low/cosmetic defect, but it just adds to the sense that the application is turning to crap.
How many cosmetic bugs does your organization think it can leave in a released application before the user thinks it’s crap? I bet the real number is far lower than your dev team thinks it is.
I found this hanging out of the receipt printer at a gas pump:
You know, if you’re copyrighting your single line test messages, maybe you’re overdoing it a little.
Does anyone want to guess whether this printer was untested or whether concerns about the inappropriate nature of this copyright were undiscovered or ignored?
Sure, it’s a country song, but it’s a gritty country song about self-reliance. You know what? QA ain’t respected much among the cool kids in IT, but we maintain our own machines and computer labs, design and develop tests and test scripts, and divine the ill intentions of developers and project managers and act accordingly. QA can do it all, and sometimes we’d like to spit some beechwood into them dudes’ eyes.
Also, note Junior once fell off of a mountain and broke himself up so badly that his brain was exposed to the open air. And that’s before his best years of recording. He’s tough enough for QA.
