QA Hates You

The application could handle it. The business behind the application? Not so much.

You need to be careful about what you promise—especially when you make a promise on social media.

This adage is ringing loud and clear for Toronto-based Timothy’s Coffee. In an effort last month to grow its Facebook fan base, the company ran a promotion saying that anyone who “liked” its page would receive four free 24-pack boxes of single-serve coffee. As the Toronto Star reports, this was rather generous, as these boxes retail for over $17 CAD each.

A contest aggregating site picked up the promotion and, as you can imagine, responses poured in, reports the Star. Problem is, the stock of product was depleted within three days of the launch, yet Timothy’s still sent emails telling people their coffee was on the way.

The best part? This is an EPIC WIN! for Timothy’s Coffee’s interactive agency, since a promotion so successful that it makes headlines is AWESOME! It’ll be in all the presentations from here on out.

As always, you have to remember that the little numbers on the screen match up with numbers somewhere else in real life. And your application can be one hundred percent consistent with itself, but if its business rules and limits do not align with the real life it represents, it’s a worthless application.

(Link seen via tweet, but I forget whose. Sorry.)

Ah, the old “insecure images on a secure Web page error”:

That one is classic. And ongoing on oh so many sites that try to use their insecure templates on their secured Web pages.

A classic scene from WarGames:

Fortunately, they did not have anyone testing the WOPR. I mean, seriously, number of players zero? Anyone reading this blog would have caught that and made them fix it, and blammo, nuclear war.

If you’re anything like Pinnacle Systems, the answer is either “Nobody.” or “The same person who wrote it, using the same rules of !grammar.”

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Your organization does realize that these are written communications akin to actual documentation, doesn’t it?

Oh, who are we kidding, of course they don’t. They leave it to developers to jot something down here and expect it will never be seen.

Why don’t you snoop around and see how it’s done? At the very least, it will make you look busy. At the very best, you can help further mask how functionally illiterate many of your co-workers are (or cover better that things are not written by native language speakers).

Ladies and gentlemen, a computer user, anecdotally:

Just a quick note of thanks for your recent comments concerning iPad use by seniors. I just gave my 88 year old Dad an iPad (original, WIFI only) for his birthday, in an effort to replace his aging & very limited WebTV. Success beyond all expectations! He very quickly mastered the basics of email, browsing, and YouTube videos….

In the second decade of the 21st Century, this gentleman was using WebTV to access the Internet.

I mentioned it in passing in the latest Two Minute QAte, but WebTV users still exist. You need to remember that people, especially people who don’t work with computers all day, use outdated technologies that you probably gave up eight years ago, and you must account for these people in your planning. Even if this accounting is merely deciding you won’t support them.

Although it would be nice if you’d programmatically let them know that, too, before they’re using their rotary phones to reach out and touch your customer service representatives.

I got this new Renoir calendar for the office (what, you expected I would only like the artwork of Derek Riggs?), and I’ve noticed that it has escaped the usual bourgeois constraints of comprehensible design. Behold:

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You see, they “solve” the “real estate” problem of having a month comprise parts of six discrete weeks not by putting the final couple days on the bottom row with the preceding week, but by wrapping them to the top. You know, where you would not look for them because that’s the past. But the solution solves their problem.

When your designers break the mold and try to do something different, something that’s never been done before because now they have THE TECHNOLOGY to do it differently or merely because they’re just interns fresh from the second decade of the 21st century’s college of design pablum in their heads, you have to consider: Will my users understand this? Does it make their experience better? Or is it just something my designers want to do.

That leads me into some of my pet peeves:

• Placing the control labels into the controls. Especially irksome when I tab into the control and the label disappears.
• Reversing the normal button order of alert or confirm boxes. I hate when it’s Cancel/OK or No/Yes. Yes, I understand Macintosh has always done it that way, but it’s not the way I understand it. If I’m only half paying attention, which I usually am because I’m paying more attention to the all-woman Iron Maiden tribute band playing in the background, I’m going to do it wrong. Your application should be helping to keep me from messing up.
• Fields that are out of common order. You’ve seen forms where the Confirm Password edit box is not right after the password edit box or where the fields in an address are out of order. Okay, these are not so much design decisions, but sloppy oversights caught with no QA.

Bottom line: If you’re going to break out of the traditional metaphors your user has experienced for years or decades, you’d better make sure your application is doing it for your user’s sake, not for the bragging rights your designers will get for doing something outrageous or extreme.

Just because someone owns a computer that could handle the moonshot in 1969 doesn’t mean he or she owns a computer that can handle the extent of your cutting edge design genius:

At the RISK of REPEATING MYSELF to an entirely DEAF DUMB AND STUPID — THOUGH APPARENTLY NOT BLIND BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO HAVE THEIR FRICKING VIDEOS DON’T THEY — internet, I will say this again:

NOT EVERYONE ON THE PLANET HAS A TEN-THOUSAND DOLLAR COMPUTER WITH 75 TERABYTES OF RAM AND A HARD DRIVE CAPABLE OF PILOTING THE SPACE SHUTTLE NOR DO THEY HAVE A SCREAMING FAST INTERNET CONNECTION CAPABLE OF TRANSMITTING PURE THOUGHT TO OTHER GALAXIES IN UNDER A NANOSECOND. SO FUCKING TRIM YOUR WEBSITES, OR IF YOU ARE THE “WATCH THIS KEWL VIDEO HURR HURR” LINKERS, WARN OTHERS OF THOSE FUCKERS SO WE WON’T BOTHER TO CLICK AND HAVE OUR BROWSERS CRASH AND SEE THAT STUPID “YADDAWARE CRASHED, WOULD YOU LIKE TO NOTIFY MICROSOFT” THING ON THEIR DESKTOP.

If you’re building 3-d Flash immersive environments to sell cat food, more often than not, you’re trying too hard. Don’t only think of what all you can do with your high-end Macintoshes there in the office. Remember, Roberta is out there, limping along on a low end Windows XP box and trying to get a coupon to save her fifty cents on her next purchase of her product. If she can get it.

When you’re building a Web site or application, do you check your pages’ meta content?

Neither do the people behind the MyFox channels’ Web sites like MyFoxPhilly or MyFoxNY:

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Remember, those meta things show up a lot of places. People see it in search results, social networking site summaries, RSS, and so on. If you’re misspelling something or dumping a null in it, that’s gonna leave its mark.

Would it hurt you to view source now and then? I think not.

This article on career rotation reminds me of a point.

In Big, the hit movie from the late 1980s, star Tom Hanks rises from a clerk in data processing—that’s what technology was called back then—to become vice president of product development for a toy company. That quantum leap in status and pay took him all of a week to pull off. Some would-be fast-trackers might call that the ideal job rotation.

Some companies have always encouraged ambitious employees to rotate out of their discipline—technology, finance, marketing, operations, etc.—and into a different department, often one in which they’d have to push themselves to succeed.

The rationale is simple: By seeing how other areas of the company operate—getting the proverbial big picture—an employee becomes more valuable, and the organization as a whole gains. Six to 18 months in a new assignment arms an employee with additional knowledge and layers of skills.

That career advice is more geared to people in big corporations who aren’t in tech jobs but managerial or other non-tech components (business analysts, project managers). Nobody is going to take a technical writer and try him out in QA, for example, or give him 18 months to taste development. However, rotation is important to keep your peeps, especially your QA bunnies, from burning out.

Let me explain. No, there is too much.

One of the shortest postings in my career came when I was put on a QA team on a long deathmarch of a multimillion (and I mean two) and multiyear (and I mean like four) project to develop a custom piece of software for a client. I joined the team some months in, when they had a mostly working Java desktop application (perish the thought! because the application surely perished). I started testing an area of it and tearing it up. The client didn’t like this, didn’t like that, wanted more of that, and altered the specs so that my employer had to change it. I spent nine months essentially testing the same features of the same application and often logging the same issues when I left.

Don’t do that to your testers. Let them see different things, different projects. If you swap them around, they get more experience with the gestalt of the application/business/et cetera as well as learn new techniques, technologies, and music fitting for QA when they work with different people.

Another Web study shows that IE 6 is still alive and thrashing on the Internet especially in corporate America :

Security experts, industry analysts and even Microsoft recommend that IT departments upgrade Internet Explorer 6, yet new research shows that while there may have recently been a mock funeral for the aging browser, IE6 is still around and doing well, especially during standard business hours.

Chitika, a search-based online advertising network, conducted a study recently to learn the hour-by-hour market share of some of the leading Internet browsers. The study showed that IE6 ranked fourth among all browsers, grabbing 13% of usage during what many consider peak business hours.

I’m about to go into a project where I pressed the client to get a list of its client’s browser requirements beforehand. Shockingly, to them, the ultimate client used IE6. So I’ve pressed the development team to look at it in IE6 before turning it over to me for testing. If all goes according to prophecy, and by “prophecy” I mean the way it usually goes, they won’t, and I’ll have to load the defect tracker with IE 6 issues.

Just because Google said IE 6 was dead does not make it true.

(Link seen on Andrew Richards‘s Twitter feed.)

Steven Den Beste finds a common error with programs that write their icons to the Windows system tray:

Every time I start playing a new file, it spawns another icon in the tray. There’s only one copy of it running, and if I run my mouse pointer over them then all the phantom icons will disappear.

Let me put on my developer hat here: That’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Yeah, it tells you how many files you’ve played since you’ve moused over the system tray! I’m marking the defect RESOLVED: NOT A BUG!

As one of his commenters mentions and my experience indicates, this happens sometimes when low rent applications ab-end. And I include Yahoo! Messenger in the low end category.

Which brings me to a good testing point: So, what happens when you kill your desktop application from the task manager? Does it leave connections on the database open? Does it leave stray icons? Try it and find out. You might like it better if you know the UNIX term for it: kill.

Speaking about the Toyota software problems, Jerry Pournelle diagnoses the root of many quality problems in software:

When the computer revolution was beginning, there was a concerted effort to develop theories of computer languages. Two major champions of language reform were Niklaus Wirth** of ETH (Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and the late Edsger Dijkstra (eventually held a chair at the University of Texas in Austin). Dijkstra spent much of his life developing theories on how to “prove” programs. They and some others were largely responsible for the movement that induced the Department of Defense to develop Ada, a strongly typed and highly structured language with some similarities to Wirth’s Modula languages. (The last time I discussed it with him Wirth did not care for Ada, in part because it became too complex with too many “features” and in part because he did not approve of exception handling — and that is one argument I’m not going to get into.)

More on all this another time, but my point is that in those times there seemed to be a lot more concern with languages, and with building languages that required good programming practices. In the various Wirth languages starting with Pascal the goal was to have the compiler catch incipient bugs: it took longer to develop a program that would compile, but once it did, it was likely to do what you expected it to do. Unfortunately the computer hardware of the time wasn’t up to huge programs in strongly typed and highly structured languages; it took a long time to compile a new addition to a program. The programming world turned to C and its derivatives, and in the early days a C compiler would compile almost anything, including very tricky uses of pointers and type changes.

I don’t know what language Toyota has used to develop its drive by wire programs, but I would bet reasonable sums that it wasn’t Ada or one of the Wirth languages.

To make it easier for people to become developers, they made it easier to write software. To deleterious effect.

By the way, be sure to use the word deleterious in a sentence this week. Vocabulary is a weapon.

Here’s an e-mail that might give hope to Web designers and developers in the world, probably written by a Web designer to boot:

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I suspect a Web designer wrote that subject line because he or she left in an extraneous “this” and misspelled, “Yay!”

I can understand the glee.  Hopefully with Gmail dropping IE6 support, they can, too!  If they even think about anything but Safari or Chrome.

However, as a reminder, IE 6 has a 20% share of the browser market in this January of the year of Our Lord 2010 according to Net Market Share.  More than Firefox.  5 times that of Chrome.

If your site or application doesn’t handle it, you’re going to strand a lot of users.

Two weeks ago, an event occurred that altered the fundamental way we describe our locus within the space-time continuum.  That event, the New Year, means that any Web site to which you added content since then needs to have an updated copyright date:

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 If you’re working in PHP, such as a blog, here’s a PHP script to make it dynamic.

Another thing to check is for any recurring contests on your sites, such as stories that you ask users to share, to make certain that your terms, conditions, and rules extend to the new calendar year.

You remember that Google problem that flagged the whole Internet as malicious?

Shall we count the myriad failures inherent in it?

1. They trusted administrators to be infallible. The process or tool they use to perform the updates didn’t question whether the user really meant to flag the whole Internet. It did not validate on obvious problems. If it’s like anyplace I’ve ever worked, the administrative tool is a pasted together bit of interface and workarounds, rife with problems and untested or undertested because only administrators would use it.
2. They didn’t test it immediately. The “on-call site reliability team” took care of it. That sounds like me that either an automated process dialed some pagers or a help desk person got a phone call. They probably ought to have someone check that right away, hey? Nah, they’re Google. Everything they touch turns to good.
3. A variety of sources show that Google blames its data provider initially. That is a sign of hubris of the commonest order. Maybe they shouldn’t have been so hasty to lay blame before understanding and fixing the problem. On the other hand, Google did fix it quickly. Some organizations spend more time on the casting aspersions part of the program, sometimes foregoing fixing the problem entirely.

If Google can make these mistakes, so can your company. The key is not to use that as an excuse when your organization blows it (“Hey, it’s okay, even Google does it!”). You have to learn from these mistakes and make sure your company doesn’t trust its administrators and tests things the minute changes are made.

Story in the New York Times: Some Protect the Ego by Working on Their Excuses Early:

Every ugly exam score, blown deadline and failed project provides the opportunity to try out new excuses. It was a blowup at home. A sick cat. An emergency at work.

Not to mention the roadways: if only they hadn’t been so icy.

This kind of talk is so familiar that most people quickly dismiss it, even when it comes out of their own mouth.

This is one reason that genuine excuse artisans — and there are millions of them — don’t wait until after choking to practice their craft. They hobble themselves, in earnest, before pursuing a goal or delivering a performance. Their excuses come preattached: I never went to class. I was hung over at the interview. I had no idea what the college application required.

You know, dev teams and companies I’ve worked with often have this sort of self-limitation built into them.  You get hours and hours ignoring good quality practices like tight specs, proper communication, reasonable timelines, and tolerable levels of testing, and then they make up that time with lessons learned meetings at the back end compiling useless rationalizations for one-time events and confluences of circumstances that caused this failure, this time.

Then they’ll do the same thing the next project.  Or the next company will only do as much as the last company, because the other companies seem to tread water with known issues in their products.

On the plus side, they all get paid for the self-defeating, and will get paid in their next, higher, positions of self-defeat.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

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:

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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?

A company uses an open source control and finds that its default options inflame political sensitivities of users:

 My wife is in charge of online donations for a large international relief agency, and she recently received a strongly worded e-mail from the leader of a pro-Israeli group accusing her organization of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and threatening to spread the word among potential Jewish contributors–not a good thing.

I’ll spare you the rant, but the upshot was that we learned that the “country” drop-down menu on one of her organization’s donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes “Palestine.” Among other things, this means that Israelis can’t donate to the organization from these pages.

This isn’t the case on the agency’s own site, but it was the case on the pages for Causes, which puts widgets on social networks like Facebook and MySpace that let members donate to their favorite charities (including my wife’s).

When I got a hold of Sean Parker and Joe Green (the co-founders of Project Agape, which created Causes), they tried to fob me off with a “Thanks, we’ll look into this” response. Not what I was looking for.

I pointed out that this isn’t just any omission and addition. When you omit Israel and add Palestine (which is not even recognized as a country by the United Nations) to a country drop-down menu, you seem to be making a very loaded political statement.

This reiterates two points I’ve made previously:

• Never trust software (or libraries, or sample code, or snippets, or whatever) that you get from somewhere else.  Always vet it as you would your own code.
• Be aware of political situations, particularly country names that can change through government change, declarations of independence, or whatnot, and know what message your software sends when you omit some or include some.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Back in 2005, Electronic Arts sent out an update for its popular video game Madden 2006. The update included updated roster positions as well as a special “feature”: a lineman who was 7 inches tall.

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