QA Hates You

Joe Strazzere offers a list of tests for e-mail addresses.

Go, learn, and do. Don’t make me find them for you.

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.

A posting at DailyWTF reminds us that we should always test month edit boxes with September, especially when the user can enter 09:

See, Javascript supports octal numbers. Any number starting with a zero is octal, even if it can’t be an actual octal number. In certain languages, like Perl, trying to use a non-octal number as an octal number results in an error. In other languages, like Javascript, it silently fails.

This problem can also occur when the user selects the month from a drop-down list and converts it to a number for database purposes, so you should always test with September at least once in your testing.

There are many things one can learn from  this story:

Symantec Corp.’s early-warning system gave its enterprise customers a brief scare late Friday when it erroneously sent an alert that said an Internet-crippling attack was in progress.

However, the one I want to tease out is this lesson: always keep your junk data clean and readable and clearly defined as test data.

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The cool kids like to use Adobe Flash to build rich Web applications because if you build it in Flash, you don’t have to worry about compatibility with Web browsers. Oh, who am I kidding, they like to use Flash because it offers a bunch of effects out of the box and it does some right purty things with animation and pictures. It allows them to put forms and data submission stuff right into the flash really fast, too, often without any data validation, but that’s another story.

No, today’s lamentation is about how those cool kids build Flash animations or applications using the latest version of Adobe Flash love to use the latest gimcracks and whatnot and how people who have a previous version of the Flash player installed with their browsers sometimes don’t get to see and marvel at the genius of your design team. Sometimes, they will see nothing at all, which is very, very bad. And you know, some browsers/computers ship without Flash installed in the default browser, right? So what happens when that user tries to hit the page, he gets no message and no warning, which means he thinks the site is defective. Because it is.

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Screenshots are the QAer’s best friend, gentle reader. Appended to a defect report or printed on a color plotter at 20″ by 30″ so you can wave them two-handedly in front of the developer, they can prove conclusively that something very wrong happened with the application. Because otherwise the developers will fix something and claim it was never broken in the first place, or the humidity within the office will change, altering the flow of electrons through the network cable, producing different results when you try to recreate it, or something. It’s always something.

So, at any rate, a good screenshot adds a lot of value to a defect report or other communication.

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