QA Hates You

When you depend upon a Flash piece to jazz up your home page, you need to provide an alternative for users who don’t have Flash installed or who have a version your Web site and gee-whizzery doesn’t support.  Typically, this is a simple image filling that spot.  Ace Hardware has it right.  Almost.

Click for full size

You can see it’s an image.  It’s actually the first frame of the Flash animation exported as a JPG.  The problem?  The Flash animation contains a trio of hot spots.  The JPG?  Not so much.

They could have built an image map, or they could have removed the hotspot elements before export, or they could have even just made the whole image into a link to a store page.  Instead, they went the simple, thoughtless way and left the image unclickable, even though it would seem to indicate that you can click it to go places.

Hey, it’s cheap and easy, and the paychecks cash just as easy.

An employer putting the real job duties in the title:

Click for full size

I assume that an analsyt is supposed to just sit on his or her butt all day and let dev and project management have their ways with the project.  I’ve known a number of QA professionals who’ve thought that their jobs were, essentially, to call meetings and discuss/prioritize issues found by the customers instead of, I don’t know, understanding the software and technology and enforcing quality or testing.

Sadly, also in my experience, that unbelievable lightness of being tends to rise to management quickly.

Or something to that effect.  ComputerWorld, my go-to site for finding JavaScript errors in the wild on a slow blog day, comes up with this beauty:

Click for full size

Ponder that as a koan.  Also, remember the following are not best practices:

• Naming variables or objects null or any other reserved word.
• Passing a string value of “null” when you meant to pass null.

Dear LinkedIn.com:

Apparently, your Web site doesn’t know what YAHOO means this morning:

Click for full size

Which leaves your Web site looking like this:

Click for full size

A YAHOO is someone who promotes this error and its attendant template failure to production during business hours on a Friday, of all days, a day where workers are probably more apt to screw around and visit your site instead of doing paying work.

Eh, I guess it only bothers IE users, that small subgroup of Web users you can safely ignore.

Sometimes, people characterize QA as rabid.  Or maybe they’re just talking about me.  Regardless, I’d like to set the record straight:  actually having rabies is better than working in QA for the following reasons:

• HR is much more understanding when you bite a developer.
• With rabies, it’s seven pains in the stomach and you’re cured.  With QA, seven pains in the stomach means your ulcer has made it through the week.
• Cooler fictional archetype, Cujo, versus the predominant–and by “predominant” I mean really the only one I can think of–fictional QA archetype Creed Bratton.
• Foaming at the mouth stains less than spitting coffee when project managers tell you that you actually have minus two days to test a project, so you’d better start spinning the globe backwards like Superman immediately.
• You can pass on rabies; you cannot teach QA.
• Normal people understand what rabies is and have sympathy for it.
• The career is mercifully shorter.

On the other hand, QA pays slightly better.

Agent in place G33klady has apparently been steaming open someone else’s e-mail.  How else would she get an offer from Better Software magazine that wasn’t addressed to her?

Click for full size

Certainly that’s not a defect in an untested e-mail, hey?  Someone ask the project manager over there and find out the excuse well-considered reason why this occurred and how much money the magazine saved by not testing/fixing problems.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Web site, StlToday.com, recently redesigned to great internal fanfare but not so much to user delight, has a couple of problems.  It’s hard for me to choose which part of the paper’s Web site annoys me the most, but here are some of the top candidates:

Read the rest of this entry »

As you know, readers, I’m a fan of paying attention to the status bar in Internet Explorer, ever vigilant for the icon that indicates a scripting error on the page. The QA people at GoDaddy explain how you can do the same in Safari 3.x, almost, which means your team’s designers and hipster developer have one less excuse not to notice these things before you do.

Of course, it does not address the reason, which is the inherent self-righteous sloth these people exhibit, but that’s another matter entirely.

Ah, Symantec.  We go back a decade, you and I, and I’m still loyal even though I’m hearing that your various and sundry applications and services are bloated and slow me down horribly.  But I’m in no hurry, really; five o’clock comes at the same time every day, no matter how fast my PC runs.  But I’m a little disappointed with your technical support form.  For a security company, you probably shouldn’t get a security warning on the form, for starters.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jr Software Tester, if you can get away with it:

Description:
*Maintenance of the environments for the SE system test systems. *Execution of testing processes prior to live deployment. *Interaction with other organizations to get sufficient support from the instructions for PM, Planning and Validation team and all others necessary throughout our portion of the testing life cycle. *Oversee and direct workload from US day shift to offshore resources *Defect management and problem resolution for testing errors

Those whacky jobs posted on Craigslist.  When you manage people, it’s like called a management sort of position in most places.  Perhaps this job poster doesn’t equate furriners as people.

If it’s the philosophy of the hiring firm to indeed have someone come in off of the street and manage the offshore team, perhaps the job heading should be more appropriately titled Scapegoat wanted! with a description Make slightly more than you would managing a gas station, but with more ulcers.

Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software and Joel on Software says:

A long time ago, it became fashionable, even recommended, to disable menu items when they could not be used.

Don’t do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there’s some reason you can’t complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

Point of order, wealthy poobah, but, seriously, that’s adding three extra steps to the process (click something you can’t do, read why you can’t do it, and dispel the message).  Nothing’s worse than an application that lets you try to do something and then taunts you when you cannot.

Additionally, this course of action gives developers the ability to make mistakes in implementing the solution, where turning them off until explicitly needed is a simple checkbox in the IDE.  Sometimes, you can trust developers with a checkbox.

Reader and field agent Isarian questions the wisdom of this operation:

Click for full size

I mean, if you cannot trust a control whose name is not available from an unknown publisher, whom can you trust?

He encountered this problem on this page; I haven’t gotten this message, but I probably already am infected with whatever ActiveX esploit this is.  I do see that not all content is loading, which leads me to believe it’s yet another case of an advertisement rotator failing badly.

Hey, it’s the first anniversary of QAHatesYou.com.  Celebrate by perusing the archives, starting with July 9, 2007.

Over the weekend, several people told me that Pizza Hut was having trouble with its online ordering.  Some stores were apparently unable to process orders placed online, and the Web site itself offered one user this helpful message when trying to preorder:

Click for full size

I love how that error message, Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand, makes it sound like it’s your browser’s fault.  Not that it’s the previous Web page that built a bad request out of its hacked-together code.

It’s not me, it’s you.  If this were vocalized, it would not be HAL’s voice.  It would be that dev team leader with the thin glasses and Van Dyke (not a freaking goatee, people!) who always explains suavely to the project manager that only QA would find error #7.56808d1.1215369972.0.  Yeah, QA and innumerable hungry people on a holiday weekend.

Speaking of which, what was it, the load this weekend?  Or an ill-timed upgrade of some sort?  Sure, a nice, long holiday weekend is a good time to make an update to a business application, but not a consumer-facing application.

A few weeks ago, ComputerWorld offered an almost helpful guideline, Narcissists at work: How to deal with arrogant, controlling, manipulative bullies.  The Narcissist is described as:

Narcissism, defined as a personality disorder by the National Institutes of Health, is a pattern of behaviors that show a pervasive need for attention and admiration, as well as a lack of concern or empathy for others.

Jean Ritala.In the workplace, says Ritala, narcissists tend to be successful and goal-oriented, with no concern for others who get in their way. They feel a need to control co-workers, projects and situations around them, and they can be manipulative, spinning situations and facts to make it appear that others around them are the problem, not them.

According to Ritala, narcissists often display the following traits at work:

• Arrogant and self-centered, they expect special treatment and privileges.
• They can be charismatic, articulate and funny.
• They are likely to disrespect boundaries and the privacy of others.
• They can be patronizing and critical of others but unwilling or unable to accept criticism or disagreement.
• Likely to be anxiety-stricken or paranoid, they may exhibit violent, rage-like reactions when they can’t control a situation or their behaviors have been exposed.
• They are apt to set others up for failure or pit co-workers against one another.
• They can be cruel and abusive to some co-workers, often targeting one person at a time until he quits.
• They may need an ongoing “narcissist supply” of people who they can easily manipulate and who will do whatever they suggest — including targeting a co-worker — without question.
• They are often charming and innocent in front of managers.

We in QA prefer to use the term developers, designers, or client account representatives for the same concept.  Whereas ComputerWorld prefers hiring a professional who coaches people on how to handle narcissists, convincing narcissists to attend counseling, and involving HR every step of the way in documenting narcissism so they can be disciplined, your Director has a simpler solution:

Hire sociopaths to counteract the narcissists.

Remember to hire a good mix of creepy/scary sociopaths and charming, manipulative sociopaths to keep the other teams in the office off-balance.  Also, remember you cannot really manage those with no moral compass but a drive for quality excellence; you have to sort of herd them.

Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  He could have also made that point about Web design if he’d lived to be 210 years old.  Case in point: This privacy statement on the Westlake Ace Feedback site:

 
Click for full size

The link in the footer links to the current page, of course.  It’s like having a link labeled HOME on the index page of a site.  Sure, it’s not hurting anything, but conceptually and logically, it’s flawed, since it–based on the nature of links–acts as though it’s going to take the user somewhere else.

Additional design mockery below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Even Slashdot, tech Web heaven, looks as though it can fall prey to problems with ad rotators:

Click for full size

Oops.

When you lie down with someone else’s developers, you often get their bugs, too.

Note that the issue shown above appears to be fixed.  For now.

Or at least that’s what I infer from the compensation package offered for this job:

Click for full size

Maybe I’m mistaken.  Perhaps this company is looking for some goth QA people, so it’s promising to turn them to vampires on their first day.

When your Web site cannot find a page, it often displays a special custom 404 message configured on your server.

What happens if the site cannot find it?

Everything goes meta:

Click for full size

Dude, that’s like a 404 message for a 404 message.

In this case, it looks like it’s gotten left behind since the Web site URL without the non-existent page name redirects, and the redirected Web site with the non-existent page name is handled.  However, it looks as though with all of the redirection going on, some misdirection has occurred.

You do keep track, QA professional, of all of the URLs and all of the landing directories and all of the page names to make sure that they’re handled when the site changes in such a fashion to render them incorrect, right?  Right?

g33klady passes along along a Web site for our mockery:

Click for full size

Apparently, she was looking for credible information about Web QA.  Somehow, showing the format in which the data should display instead of actual, you know, data sort of ruins that credibility.

We’ve seen that sort of thing before.  How hard is it to add a conditional to a template that says “If there’s no data to display, don’t display the block of text”?  It must be harder than it appears if it takes a committee of developers and project managers to determine that it’s too hard or expensive to bother.