Duran Duran, “Wild Boys” from 1984, which is before the internal clocks of many of our compatriots in this industry began, the damn kids.
In 1985, I wanted to look like Simon Le Bon. In 2013, now that he’s 55, I’m closer than ever.
I clicked through a retweet to an article entitled “Which Programming Language Should I Learn First? on Lifehacker.
And then I almost fainted when I saw the sample code they included for Hello, World programs.
As you know, gentle reader, I’ve often thumped tubs about how any program used to teach students and that outputs Hello World is teaching the youngsters to program defects at the outset because, as “World” in this instance is a noun of direct address, it should be offset by a comma (Hello, World).
So when I saw the sample code included, where the programs for Java and C have that very comma in them, I was amazed. I had to immediately tweet about how it changed my life.
But then I looked closer: In addition to Java and C, the article includes samples of Python and Perl. And the commas are missing.
So I guess it’s more of a crash course in development than the writer intended.
It’s a collection kludged together, and nobody’s going to think to check consistency or know if there’s a problem in different areas of the software except for QA. Because the milestone and the deadline were met.
In North American football, the offense sometimes runs a draw play, which is a delayed handoff that gets the moving parts of the defense to act before the offense turns the ball over to its running back:
The idea behind a draw play is to attack aggressive, pass-rushing defenses by “drawing” them downfield. This creates larger gaps between defenders and thereby allows the offense to effectively run the ball. Draw plays are often run out of the shotgun formation, but can also be run when the quarterback is under center. These types of draw plays are sometimes referred to as “delayed handoffs”. The running back will most often run straight downfield through the “A-Gap” (the space between the center and the offensive guard), although there are more complicated variations.
Now, in our deadline-driven software development world, we often find ourselves typing and clicking as fast as we can to get as much test coverage as we can in our allotted time. In a way, we’re playing to software that’s trained to be aggressive linebackers, running toward our software’s operations as fast as possible. Kinda like I started charging into this metaphor too quickly and find myself off-balance, unable to elegantly segue to my point.
Within applications, you can sometimes find defects by delaying actions. If your software integrates with other software or services asynchronously, the expectations of the code might not match how fast–or slow–a user might interact with the software.
For example, a shopping cart piece of e-commerce with distinct units might mark those units as Hold, Wait For Payment if a user adds it to the shopping cart and starts the payment process. If the hold has a timeout associated with it–an expectation that, if the user does not complete the payment within five minutes (or two minutes, or twenty minutes) that the payment has been abandoned and the system should remove the hold. However, in the case of paying with PayPal, the PayPal window itself can linger for that duration and more, ready to accept your login and confirmation of payment, at which time PayPal will send a payment received message to your system. For an item whose hold might have been relinquished and might not be available any more. How will you know unless you hold onto that ball for a a couple of seconds and let all the integrated software make their plays?
Another example: Financial software that uses two stages of authentication. The first time you log in from a browser, it prompts you for your user name and then directs you to a security question; after you answer that correctly, it prompts you for your password. If you log in and don’t do anything for ten minutes, your session times out. But what happens if it takes you longer than ten minutes to answer your security question? What happens if you answer the security question but don’t enter a password in those ten minutes?
The draw test is a valid line of testing because your users don’t live to fill out your forms. In their real lives, they’re called to meetings, go to lunch, minimize the browser window when a co-worker comes in, or otherwise temporarily delay their activity in a fashion that might put their next actions beyond your software’s expectations. If you take a little time, you can identify the places where your system might allow this and to make sure your software handles delayed action on your user’s part elegantly.
Developers, listen to the kind man Frank Hayes as he explains you should never set the cat on fire:
QA: Do just the opposite of what he says except for the first verse and the cat thing.
I wish someone would ask me that question in an interview just so I could say, “A squirrel.”
A half-crazed Mississippi squirrel.
Not me, and not really the magazine. It’s only the Web site, but it is Ben Simo:
Nearly 20 million Americans have now experienced the broken Obamacare website first hand. But Ben Simo, a past president of the Association for Software Testing, found something more than a cumbersome login or a blank screen—clear evidence of subpar coding on the site.
Congrats, Ben!
Cracked (I put the name in italics because it was a magazine in my day, sonny, and I fancy myself the IT world’s Sylvester P. Smythe) has a piece entitled 5 Reasons Tech Companies Make Bad Gadgets (An Inside Look) that you might want to read.
It’s not about software per se, but it looks awfully familiar.
A quote commonly attributed to Napoleon says:
Rascality has limits; stupidity has not.
I’m testing this application as rascally as I can, but I am only one member of the team, and the users are infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters and hammers and stone tablets.
Am I being stupid enough? How can I be more stupid?
Long-named US woman celebrates government climb-down:
A US woman has won a battle to have her full name put on her driving licence.
Janice “Lokelani” Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele’s name is so long – containing 36 letters and 19 syllables – that it would not fit on the documentation.
What is the lesson here?
The obvious lesson, of course, is that you need to consider names other than Mike Smith when building your applications. Of course, we’re pretty much past that now given our more worldly software development culture (people who build and alter government computer systems not included, of course).
But you’ve got to test those long strings going into the system, and you’ve got to test those long strings coming out of the system.
If you’re displaying someone’s name, does the name lie over other design elements on the page or, urk, the mobile app? If it’s printing out somewhere, is there room on the page or in the PDF for it?
You’ll never know until you try. Your developers will never know until you try, either, because they won’t try it themselves.
(Link via Tweet.)
Apparently, there’s an Android game called Send Me To Heaven that… Well, I can’t explain it any better than:
S.M.T.H. (Send Me To Heaven) is a sport game. Player throws his phone as high as he can. The higher, the better. The phone registers the height and uploads result to leader boards. World Top 10, Week Top 10 and Day Top 10 lists are available.
That’s about the funniest thing I’ve read all week.
Apple, though, rejected it.
Five Finger Death Punch, “Lift Me Up”.
Language warning.
Motorcyclist survives lightning strike while riding on freeway:
A motorcyclist riding on Interstate 5 survived a lightning strike Thursday as a tumultuous day of weather saw thunderstorms and rain roll through Washington on both sides of the Cascade Mountains.
The biker was riding through Chehalis in western Washington when the lightning hit Thursday morning, Washington State Patrol Trooper William Finn said.
Remember, remote chances of a bad thing occurring are not the same as no chance, and you need to assess your risk accordingly. Individually, people have a very remote chance of winning the lottery, yet someone wins the lottery every couple of weeks.
Make sure when assessing your risk, calculate in the severity of the problem and the number of users mashing the keys in addition to the remoteness of the possibility of that happening.
The first step on software testing appearing in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 6: a scientific-sounding name for the QA mindset: negative dispositional attitude:
New research has uncovered the reason why some people seem to dislike everything while others seem to like everything. Apparently, it’s all part of our individual personality — a dimension that researchers have coined “dispositional attitude.”
People with a positive dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to like things, whereas people with a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The journal article, “Attitudes without objects: Evidence for a dispositional attitude, its measurement, and its consequences,” was written by Justin Hepler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dolores Albarracín, Ph.D., the Martin Fishbein Chair of Communication and Professor of Psychology at Penn.
Realism is an illness.
I was alerted via Tweet about a software test engineer getting noticed for his pipes:
It took only 45 minutes to change Michael Wansley’s life. The Seattle-based singer, known by his stage name Wanz, has found himself at the top of the charts with his bass-heavy credit on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop,” which has now enjoyed two weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100.
. . . .
Now, the former software test engineer is taking a shot at solo stardom. Having toured the country with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis over the past few months and performed with them on “The Ellen Show,” Wanz is building his brand on social networking sites and recording a six-track EP that he hopes to release before he joins the pair on their Australian trek next month.
Here’s the song the article talks about, “Thrift Shop”. I think it’s about quality assurance budgets somehow.
Warning: Hip-hop language. Might not be safe for your workplace.
If this had happened to Amazon, Google, or another company geeks love, you would have heard about it already: Computer Problems Leave Goods Stranded at New York Port:
Computer problems at one of the East Coast’s biggest ports have snarled the flow of cargo across the Northeast for weeks, delaying the delivery of consumer goods needed for back-to-school sales and the start of the holiday shopping season.
The problems at the Port of New York and New Jersey began in June, when Maher Terminals LLC, one of the world’s largest handlers of shipping containers, launched a new computer operating system, according to shipping, trucking, retail-industry and government officials.
. . . .
Maher Terminals and the operating system’s maker, Navis LLC, a division of Finland-based Cargotec Corp., said in a joint news release last week that “real-time interactions between the various system components deployed in the container yard were not operating as designed.” As a temporary solution, certain automated components of the system were scaled back, the companies said. They didn’t reveal the source of the problems.
Rest assured, it worked on a developer’s machine.
Meanwhile, even though it did not impact geeks directly, this bug had huge impact all down the logistical downstream.
An article entitled An Important Life Lesson from Blackjack and Baseball: You gain more by not being stupid than you do by being smart has this brief takeaway:
The moral: You gain more by not being stupid than you do by being smart. Smart gets neutralized by other smart people. Stupid does not.
The gist: In some competitions, you can lose on purpose, but you can only try to win on purpose, so making the smart moves won’t necessary lead you to success and winning. But making stupid moves can and will thwart you.
In software development or startups, it’s easy to fall into that bad habit of pursing something new, neat, or smart and forgetting to take care of the little things like user experience and bounding your edit boxes.
That’s where QA comes in: We’re trying to box out some of the stupid.
Firefox 23 nixes support for outdated blink HTML tag:
Mozilla announced on Tuesday that Firefox 23, the latest version of its browser, will not support the HTML tag blink.
I would tell you to enjoy it while you can, but it’s already gone, and you never noticed it.
I’ve always used the blink tag to test whether edit boxes appropriately strip HTML formatting because it was a nice, obvious way to see if that failed. Oh, well, I still have the h1 tag, I suppose.
UPDATE: This post was originally entitled Fortunately, It Still Works in IE 6 until someone pointed out it does not work in IE 6. Deep down I knew that, but I was too quick with the quippy headline. Thanks, Jen. I have updated the headline with an alternate quip.
Xerox scanners/photocopiers replacing 6s with 8s? In some cases, apparently so:
In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like:
- Incorrect invoices
- Construction plans with incorrect numbers (as will be shown later in the article) even though they look right
- Other incorrect construction plans, for example for bridges (danger of life may be the result!)
- Incorrect metering of medicine, even worse, I think.
Who knew you had to test your printed outputs? I did.
Back in 2007, a developer caused a delay in a very large software launch for an Easter egg or a prank:
Microsoft reps have told Next-Gen the real reason for the Halo 2 Vista delay: partial nudity–specifically someone’s backside in the game’s map editor, the Entertainment Software Rating Board added today.
. . . .
Friday morning, however, the ESRB e-mailed Next-Gen a statement that said a “photograph of an individual showing his bare backside” is accessible within Halo 2 Vista’s exclusive map editor tool. Apparently, it pops up when an “.ass” error occurs….
Hijinks that cost the company millions.
Moral of the story: Always check your software for .ass errors.
Earl Wiener was a former military pilot who became professor of management science and industrial engineering at the University of Miami and conducted a lot of studies on how automation in the cockpit affects the pilots.
At some point, he put together a pithy list of things about automation and going more to fly-by-wire systems. These are known as Wiener’s Laws:
(Note: Nos. 1-16 intentionally left blank)
17. Every device creates its own opportunity for human error.
18. Exotic devices create exotic problems.
19. Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors.
20. Complacency? Don’t worry about it.
21. In aviation, there is no problem so great or so complex that it cannot be blamed on the pilot.
22. There is no simple solution out there waiting to be discovered, so don’t waste your time searching for it.
23. Invention is the mother of necessity.
24. If at first you don’t succeed… try a new system or a different approach.
25. Some problems have no solution. If you encounter one of these, you can always convene a committee to revise some checklist.
26. In God we trust. Everything else must be brought into your scan.
27. It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot.
28. Any pilot who can be replaced by a computer should be.
29. Whenever you solve a problem you usually create one. You can only hope that the one you created is less critical than the one you eliminated.
30. You can never be too rich or too thin (Duchess of Windsor) or too careful what you put into a digital flight guidance system (Wiener).
31. Today’s nifty, voluntary system is tomorrow’s F.A.R. [Federal Aviation Regulation]
Because it’s got the word automation right in it, you’re probably looking at it in terms of test automation, but computer software itself is an automation of other processes, so the lessons therein apply more broadly.
You can read more about Wiener in this Aviation Week archive, and I’ll daresay we can learn a lot.
