QA Hates You

When you’re testing an application with any sort of security, you test the following as a matter of course:

• User with correct username/password can log in.
• User with incorrect username/correct password cannot log in.
• User with correct username/incorrect password cannot log in.
• User can log out.
• User who is not logged in cannot access protected functions.

However, in the case of some applications and most Web applications, the server has a time limit on user inactivity; that is, after a certain amount of time, the server assumes that the user is done and shuts off the connection. You better make sure that works.

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As some of you know, the old calendaring system in use with certain Western countries from Roman times, called the Julian calendar, had some problems with not keeping up with the sun or something esoteric. To correct this, the Church made some adjustments to leap years and whatnot and blah blah blah (you want the details, go to Wikipedia).

However, this little bit of historical trivia lends itself to some fun with your date entry fields.

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CBS News’s video player shows an awful lot of precision when you play with the Play and Pause buttons:

Click for full size

The clip length shows to 14 places to the right of the seconds, but it rounds immediately after displaying. If you work it just right, you can get it to display 0 of NaN.

Why the developer chose to display the real number before performing the rounding, I don’t know. Wait, you’re saying it was unplanned? As though the developer just churned out code without thinking? Say it ain’t so!

But while we’re on the subject, let me tell you some of the things I like to do to these Flash media players.

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1. I have multiple machines here in the QAHY lab.
2. I have the Yahoo! Messenger program installed on multiple machines and it’s set to automatically log in on a couple.
3. Yahoo! allows a single user to log in only on one machine at a time.
4. I use custom status messages to share my wit, so I often open the dialog box that allows you to enter that text.
5. On patch or installation days, it’s not uncommon for my PCs to contend and collide for which one is actually logged into Yahoo! Messenger.

I say this so you’ll understand that I wasn’t looking for trouble with Yahoo! Instant Messenger. I was just using the software like I normally do.

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Remember when I told you how to check your PDFs? Apparently, J. Deitch, who works for someone who does Amazon.com’s promotions, wasn’t listening.

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You want to stop the heart of your tech team or project managers? Here’s how you do it:

1. Open your crucial, behind, and ultimately doomed Web project in your Web browser.
2. Type the following into your Web browser’s address bar:
   

   
javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5); void(0);

3. Press ENTER.
4. The images on the page will start to swirl. Set focus to the Web browser’s address bar.
5. Retype the URL of the doomed project, but do not press ENTER or click Go (that would reload the page without the JavaScript running.
6. Walk away from your desk knowing that will display until the screensaver kicks on.

Ah, yes. A wayward project manager wandered over and caught sight of it, almost entering a state of hyperventilation as she summoned the complete tech team to her aid to discover what was going on.

I only wish I could have been there to see it, but I was away from my desk.

If nothing else, it should teach lessons in shoulder-surfing QA.

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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Gentle reader, I want to let you in on a little soft underbelly your Web sites and Web applications might have. The querystring.

As you might know, gentle reader, the querystring is that junk in the Address bar of the Web application. It includes the URL/pagename of the page your user is accessing, but it also can include parameter/value pairs that server-side applications process. That is, it’s a way that your developers can ignore inserting error-catching logic and show the world the stack traces they’re so proud of.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the infamous Hamlet Test, explained for your edification and as a tool for your arsenal. Some might call it a mechanism for Boundary Analysis, but it’s more than that. It’s just plain mean.

The use case, if you need one (oh, and how you’ll need one since “rock star” developers will tell you this would never happen in real life so he can, instead of writing flawless code, can get back to YouTubing): Back when I was a technical writer, I used to write the documentation by using software. Hey, I know, that’s an odd concept; most technical writers, if they exist for an organization, will take what the developers give them and put it into a serifed font and call it a day. Not me, I actually used the software, which also explains why I had the second highest defect count in the company, above most of the full time QA people, but that’s another story.

So there I am, swiping and pasting data from the application into my text editor (UltraEdit, don’t you know?) while I’m rearranging a user’s guide weighing in at about 250 pages. I’m reorganizing procedures and how-tos, building new chapter intros, and whatnot, and I’m swiping and pasting from a massive Microsoft Word document at the same time as I’m swiping and pasting shorter strings from the application.

You can see where this is going, right? A never-in-the-real-world situation occurs. Instead of pasting a short string into an edit box, I dumped an entire chapter of the user guide into it. And it took it.

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