QA Hates You

The following is not a compensated post; I’m merely extolling the virtues of a piece of software I found useful.

I have been a fan of UltraEdit probably for about a decade; I cannot actually remember the last time I had a PC onto which I did not install this robust little text editor.

Notepad and Wordpad come free with Windows and most workstations in offices come with Microsoft Word these days, so you might not see the value in adding another program to your desktop. However, UltraEdit adds a number of features not currently available in these other applications, including:

• Syntax highlighting, which shows keywords in a number of languages in another color to make the files more easily readable. The list of languages and the keywords themselves are extensible, so you can make your own as needed (I once made keyword files for MOL and SDF chemical data files).
• Tabbed view, which means I can have a bunch of files or empty files open and can work on them at once, seeing their contents at a glance. Neither Notepad or Wordpad offer the multiple files thing, and Microsoft Word allows multiple files, but not a tabbed view.
• Find or search/replace in files, which lets you dig through all the files in a folder to find what you need.

At only $50 a throw, I install it on every PC I own, as I mentioned, and I’ve also introduced it to every workplace where I’ve been in the last decade. Friends, let me tell you that this includes a rather surreal experience I had with my last Corporate employer.
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And on the page load is probably the wrong time:

Yes, it’s one little menu command or maybe button on a toolbar, but the Import… command exposes the soft underbelly of your application.

You know how your developers always shirk adding validation logic to any administrative tools because only administrators will use it, and administrators never try bonehead things? Well, the import feature offers access to the actual data that users normally have to use one or more screens on your application to enter. One or more screens to which developers have possibly added data validation after much prompting and shaming from the QA staff.

But short of actually corrupting the data in the database directly (which is fun, and I’d recommend trying it for its own sake), the import feature offers a means to enter crap into the database (or try to, anyway) that nature did not intend for that database.
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