“When I am accessing a website that has Flash, I usually get a blank part of the screen, or a red box where the Flash element is,” Cunha says. “Or I may just get a static image.” If the organization behind that website hasn’t developed a scaled-down mobile-friendly alternative, Cunha says he usually avoids the site totally.

Back when I was at the interactive agency, we always tested to see the site without Flash and provided a different static image if the browser didn’t have Flash installed.

I’m sure that’s all done away with now, and most Web shops thought (if they thought at all) that Flash penetration was high enough to make that unnecessary.

And then, a couple years later, popular tablets and smartphones did not support Flash, and the lamentations begin.

Here’s a bit of advice, gratis: If you’re building or testing Web sites, always check to see what happens if dependent technologies aren’t there, and handle their absence gracefully. Sure, the technologies might have a lot of market penetration now, but what’s going to happen in a couple years?

Unless you’re a fan of clients clamoring for free fixes to their suddenly broken sites, just do it. You’ll make me quieter about it, anyway.

Not only do you have to accommodate the date of February 29, 2012, but you need to also check any calculations that count the days.

Cost Effective Engineering Solution

A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can not be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down to the supermarket don’t get angry and buy another product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution – on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done to re-start the line.

A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should have been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before the scale, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes off of the belt and into a trash bin.

“Oh, that,” says one of the workers “one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of having to walk over every time the bell rang”!!

I’ve also received that question in job interview/sales pitch situations. Well, not phrased exactly like that: the question is usually, “What is the first thing you’ll look at to improve our quality?” And the answer is always along the lines of, “It depends what you’re doing now.”

The person who asks that question often wants a silver bullet answer, some glib response that encapsulates how to improve their quality and process with an elevator pitch. And, in many cases, they get an elevator pitch selling some particular process or methodology that might or might not deliver a significant improvement but will most certainly come at some cost.

You’ll get the biggest leaps in quality, productivity, and process by listening to the people who are doing what you do every day, and maybe you’ll be better off listening to them rather than bringing in outsiders who have a Procrustean process that your organization will fit one way or the other.

Which is just my way for covering my fumbling answer to the question, which is that some small thing will yield vast improvements, but I don’t know what that small thing is yet.

Why bother including it if there’s only one choice?

They grafted a third party package onto the Web site and did not suppress the field or they have a system beyond that which is customer-facing with other priorities but did not suppress the field on the customer-facing site. Either way, you can guess what I think they should have done.

Suppress a field where the user has no choice.

A computer glitch at a New Zealand supermarket led to its doors being opened despite being officially closed, allowing shoppers to walk away with free groceries, The (London) Times reports.

At 8am Friday, the New Zealand supermarket’s computerized system opened its doors and switched on its lights, ready for business as usual. The only problem was nobody had actually told the computer it was Good Friday, a day when supermarkets in New Zealand don’t open, and there was not a checkout person in sight.

That didn’t stop the locals in the North Island city of Hamilton, and soon the Pak ‘n Save aisles were as busy as any normal day, although shoppers were filling their carts and walking straight past the checkout to their cars.

To be honest, this sounds like more of a configuration issue than an actual software bug. Hopefully, the list of holidays and dates would be configurable in any regard. However, we’re reading a story on an Australian Web site that recounts what was reported in a London newspaper, so everything, from the actual occurrence to the reasons behind it, is suspect.

However, it does lend itself to something of a lesson for QA: If your software/embedded systems are to be used around the world, how familiar are you with the processes and impacts in your target markets? You could do like Trisherino does and study from a high level a different country each week, but most importantly, you need to understand practical considerations of your target markets, including character sets and calendars, to test effectively.

Cloud computing is all very well until someone trips over a wire and the whole thing goes dark.

Reddit, Foursquare and Quora were among the sites affected by Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors this morning, according to the company’s own status dashboard.

Amazon says performance issues affected instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its Relational Database Service, and it’s “continuing to work towards full resolution”. These are hosted in its North Virginia data centre.

I always include test cases that deal with instances where the server isn’t there, where the database isn’t there, and where other pieces of infrastructure are unavailable. What happens when your poor little client (or Web page in your browser) finds itself all alone?

The name, address, and the approval number are all obviously dummy data. Should your system in production be outputting this? Of course not. But do you let the users–in this case, an installer or an administrator of the kiosk–just use the dummy data?

You see this trap sometimes when applications put the labels for controls as text in the controls themselves, such as an edit box that says “First Name” until you type into it. Sometimes, you’ll find the application will check to make sure the edit box is not empty, but the application is perfectly happy with “First Name” in it. The application is happy, but is the client happy that 50% of his registrations come from First Name Last Name of Address City State 55555? I think not. Don’t let them do it. Even if they’re trusted computer professionals.

Secondly, this is another reminder to check all your application’s outputs, QA. I know, that means sometimes getting up from the faintly warm glow of your monitor and the seat that has molded itself nicely to your backside, but if your application prints anything, you’d better make sure it looks good on paper (and on A4 paper if you’re pretending international use).

So when it was time to choose a handful of languages to test with, my reaction was to choose:

1. one or more Latin-based languages
2. one or more languages with a heavy use of diacriticals
3. a RTL [Right-to-left] language
4. a language that is more symbolic than character-based

A common problem in testing with these languages is the lack of keyboard or a means of entering characters from different languages. Cut and paste can work if you’re careful.

You know, that’s a handy set of tests for anytext-accepting control on any Web site, even if your application only expects and only accepts (allegedly) English.

Instead of a pricing and log-in page, I get a simple screen that says “Before you access the Internet, please take a few minutes to complete a short survey. Your responses will help us improve United in-flight Wi-Fi.”

There’s no option here to skip the survey. I must fill it out. I watched other passengers encounter this page and it’s there for everyone. I’m guessing it’ll be there for a while, so I’ll get to fill it out on every wi-fi flight I take until they stop the survey.

Of course, they want everyone’s opinion. However, do they want everyone’s opinion multiple times? How does that help them?

Given no choice, I started up the survey. That’s when it got really amusing.

You, dear QA, should keep up with good interface design procedures–or at least refresh your list of quiz best practices–with this list. Because things that annoy users are things that should annoy you. And when you’re annoyed, you can spread the love more effectively than some poor sop at 32,000 feet.

Don’t be like the people who assembled the JC Penney catalog this week:

Click for full size

Remember to take just a couple seconds to make sure:

• The words in the heading are spelled correctly.
• The heading actually applies to the text.
• The heading corresponds to any anchor tags associated with it.
• The heading is in the proper font and size for headings (especially if it’s an image).
• The heading’s structure is parallel with those of equal heading level.
• The heading’s grammar is correct.
• alt and title attributes for heading images match the image text.
• Headings render in the same style across browsers.

They’re just one little aspect of each page, but you and a lot of people in your organization (and your clients and audience) might overlook them. Everyone else has an excuse to do so. You, QA, do not.