QA Hates You

When you depend upon a Flash piece to jazz up your home page, you need to provide an alternative for users who don’t have Flash installed or who have a version your Web site and gee-whizzery doesn’t support.  Typically, this is a simple image filling that spot.  Ace Hardware has it right.  Almost.

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You can see it’s an image.  It’s actually the first frame of the Flash animation exported as a JPG.  The problem?  The Flash animation contains a trio of hot spots.  The JPG?  Not so much.

They could have built an image map, or they could have removed the hotspot elements before export, or they could have even just made the whole image into a link to a store page.  Instead, they went the simple, thoughtless way and left the image unclickable, even though it would seem to indicate that you can click it to go places.

Hey, it’s cheap and easy, and the paychecks cash just as easy.

Or something to that effect.  ComputerWorld, my go-to site for finding JavaScript errors in the wild on a slow blog day, comes up with this beauty:

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Ponder that as a koan.  Also, remember the following are not best practices:

• Naming variables or objects null or any other reserved word.
• Passing a string value of “null” when you meant to pass null.

Dear LinkedIn.com:

Apparently, your Web site doesn’t know what YAHOO means this morning:

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Which leaves your Web site looking like this:

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A YAHOO is someone who promotes this error and its attendant template failure to production during business hours on a Friday, of all days, a day where workers are probably more apt to screw around and visit your site instead of doing paying work.

Eh, I guess it only bothers IE users, that small subgroup of Web users you can safely ignore.

Ah, Symantec.  We go back a decade, you and I, and I’m still loyal even though I’m hearing that your various and sundry applications and services are bloated and slow me down horribly.  But I’m in no hurry, really; five o’clock comes at the same time every day, no matter how fast my PC runs.  But I’m a little disappointed with your technical support form.  For a security company, you probably shouldn’t get a security warning on the form, for starters.

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Reader and field agent Isarian questions the wisdom of this operation:

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I mean, if you cannot trust a control whose name is not available from an unknown publisher, whom can you trust?

He encountered this problem on this page; I haven’t gotten this message, but I probably already am infected with whatever ActiveX esploit this is.  I do see that not all content is loading, which leads me to believe it’s yet another case of an advertisement rotator failing badly.

g33klady passes along along a Web site for our mockery:

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Apparently, she was looking for credible information about Web QA.  Somehow, showing the format in which the data should display instead of actual, you know, data sort of ruins that credibility.

We’ve seen that sort of thing before.  How hard is it to add a conditional to a template that says “If there’s no data to display, don’t display the block of text”?  It must be harder than it appears if it takes a committee of developers and project managers to determine that it’s too hard or expensive to bother.

TradeMarkets.com tries for the World Record in JavaScript errors on a page:

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However, as we all know, the world record is 25, and TradeMarkets comes in at only 17 (by my count) unterminated string constants.

Given that this happens on every page, I’m blaming the template and probably navigational items or other page elements again. Which goes to prove, you need to be very careful with your templates or other things where your mistakes will appear on every page. Especially when you copy and paste defective elements so they appear more than once on each page.

Sure, you think you’re pretty smart. You’ve got a workflow outlined with some handy validation and logic that ensures that the user goes through the workflow in order and does what you intend. Say, for instance, you’re Wine.com. Here’s the home page; note how it loads a modal thing to force the user to select a state to ensure that he or she can actually buy wine online:

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What happens if you click continue without making a selection. Why, it gives you a handy message that indicates the very necessity of choosing a state:

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Our work here is done, right? Well, no, you’re not accounting for the Google vector. (more…)

Problems with ad serving software on WashingtonPost.com. Sometimes, on the home page, there’s a missing object:

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And even when the object is there, it has problems:

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I assume this is the ad server since the problem doesn’t happen on every page load and when it appears with the missing method argument, it leaves an empty spot marked Advertisement.

You should know by now, fellow QA, that when you have to integrate your company’s product with third party code, you do test that code out as thoroughly as your own company’s code, don’t you? Don’t leave that testing to the hands of your development staff, since they’ll be even less rigorous with it than they are with their own stuff. You have got to identify the gotchas so you can work around them and prevent them from spoiling your user’s experience.

The interior pages of the Web site for the City of Black Jack, Missouri (in reality, a small municipality well within the suburban borders of metropolitan St. Louis) has some problems with Firefox:

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If it was developed by government employees, they probably haven’t heard of Firefox yet.

It’s the little things that mean so much. For example, hop on over to the FedEx.com Spanish site. Review the Flash presentation and tell me what’s wrong with it.

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You know, ungentle reader, that I recommend you enter the longest possible string into any edit box (this is called the Hamlet test, yes?). That’s going to blow out the application where it allows too much information for the database to handle, but when you fill the string to its maximum, unbroken string or broken string, you’ll get a good glimpse as you run through the application of how wide data displays.

Kind of like ego-stroking titles render in the AJAX pop-ups on LinkedIn.com:

Remember to review how the data you put into the system displays when your application parrots it back to you.

Your 404 errors should never look like stack traces. If you’re using Apache Tomcat, like FoxBusiness.com, it might:

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Ensuring your Web server throws up an error page with relevant navigation and your logo on it would make this so much easier for the user, and it wouldn’t make it look like your Web site just crashed.

In another vein, you know, if I were in charge of QA for a heavily-trafficked, constantly updated site, I’d have more than one automated link checker running constantly on the pages. Sure, you get a performance hit as your spiders troll the sections, but you ought to have bandwidth to spare for it, and it would hopefully find broken crap before your users saw it. Or before many, anyway. Just one spider per section on constant rotation to make sure your links are as fresh as possible.

Of course, some intern is in charge of QA for most of these places, and by QA, I mean making photoQApies. Isn’t that how college students spell it these days?

Friends, I think we’ve moved enough from dumb terminal mainframe applications that most modern users do not expect the ENTER key to move them from one green- or amber-hued field to the next. Ergo, perhaps it’s time to establish, yea verily, a best practice for what the ENTER key should do in your application or form, especially when an edit box has focus.

Now we all know how it works when a radio button, checkbox, or button has focus: the ENTER key activates the button, toggles the checkbox, or sets the radio button. Okay, cool. But the whole ENTER key while in a text box thing seems to have a random number generator attached to it. I’ve seen the ENTER key do the following:

• Act as though the user clicked SUBMIT/SAVE or what have you.
• Act as though the user clicked the first button on the screen layout, which happened to be the CLEAR/RESET button (which the application set focus to on page load for some reason).
• Make the Internet browser trigger the DING! sound.
• In the case of the 2008 Subzero Dream Kitchen Sweepstakes, it identifies that data is missing if there’s no data in the field:

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I think we can agree that validating the presence of data in only the field with the focus is not what we wanted. If you have some data in the field in which you press ENTER, the form sounds the DING! for you without providing other messages.

In absence of any other prevailing reasons why not to make the application behave in a reasonable fashion*, how about we just have it so that, when the user presses ENTER, it’s just like he or she clicked SAVE/SUBMIT. Have a little sympathy for the unmousy amongst your users.

* Note to designers, project managers, developers: “Because I want it like that” or “Because it’s already like that” are not inherently reasonable answers.

When you’re designing a form (I’m using the general you, QA; I realize that designing is actually done by a 23 year old fresh out of college whose previous credits include a MySpace page and a Web log that ran for two weeks during the designer’s junior year of high school), you should put some consistency into your default values for your drop-down lists/combo boxes. Of course, since you (I mean the specific you, QA) have insights into best practices (at least those identified here), you should have something to say when the designer does something based on his or her whim.

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Here’s a slideshow on Wired featuring old stewardess photos. Want to see the uh oh?

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but come on, designers and developers, you do know that it’s very poor form–and it’s likely to be very abandoned form/promotion/application when your site relies on pop-up browser windows that the browsers themselves block.

I mention it again because the news flash hasn’t made its way around the Internet yet. In the last couple of days, I’ve found a couple of sites using Flash that try to open a new window from within the Flash, and in both cases Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 say nuh-uh, girlfriend.

The first is the home page for Graco Baby Products. The first time you visit it, and only the first time you visit it apparently, it displays a sweepstakes program of some sort:

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If you click that Enter Now button, you’re done. The pop-up is blocked and the page won’t display the link again the next time you reload the page. Which makes the odds better for the people who actually get to it, I guess.

Sorry, I don’t have a screenshot of the pop-up blocker notification since I can’t get the Flash overlay again. Also, I can’t get the swell JavaScript error that displays if you let the overlay automatically close via a timeout. But the point remains: if you’re going to use a plugin to elicit a pop-up window, you’d better make sure it works in spite of the browsers’ native pop-up blockers.

The Best Buy Hang with Hancock Better Summer Sweepstakes does the same thing. Here’s the page with the Flash-based Enter Today link:

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Click that link, and:

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Denied.

I told you guys once, I told you a thousand times about that pop-up blocker. Watch your AJAX, watch your plugins, and freaking test the thing before you send it to QA or put it live. But QA is a tell you once, tell you a thousand times sort of job.

Don’t you hate it when your slam glam new newspaper site redesign, now with its extra blinky ads crammed into it and 30 second home page load times on broadband connections, leaks its navigation all over the text?

If so, do not apply at StLToday.com.

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Because I don’t think they mind a bit over there.

Developers, in their spare time, sometimes like to share the wealth of their knowledge on Wikipedia.

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They have so many bugs to share.

When you complete an entry to the Hungry-Man Lucky 07 Sweepstakes, it offers you a chance to print a coupon:

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Let’s ignore the obvious JavaScript error. Click that Print Here, and here’s what you get:

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The coupon, and the rest of the page in solid black. Hewlett-Packard and all of the Cartridge Worlds/Walgreens in the world thank Launchpad for its efforts to stimulate the demand for toner and ink cartridges around the world.

You want to know how this sort of thing gets through? In most cases, coupon printing runs through a third party ActiveX widget or whatnot, so it’s not the agency’s problem when they go awry or it’s not the agency’s problem that the customer/user is printing a black field; that waste comes out of someone else’s pocket. There’s no responsibility in for the agency when their team can point fingers at third party integrations or whatnot.

However, it looks like this thing uses technology developed by Launchpad, so the problem is that the company just didn’t test it. Also, another problem is that you can print the coupon as many times as you want. Traditionally, programs of this nature are limited to a distinct number of coupons and somehow try to limit individual users or computers to a single coupon. If that’s a requirement here, Launchpad has failed miserably.

If you’re like me, you’re printing out hundred just in case Hungry-Man coupons become the money after the apocalypse.