QA Hates You

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.

Sometimes, people characterize QA as rabid.  Or maybe they’re just talking about me.  Regardless, I’d like to set the record straight:  actually having rabies is better than working in QA for the following reasons:

• HR is much more understanding when you bite a developer.
• With rabies, it’s seven pains in the stomach and you’re cured.  With QA, seven pains in the stomach means your ulcer has made it through the week.
• Cooler fictional archetype, Cujo, versus the predominant–and by “predominant” I mean really the only one I can think of–fictional QA archetype Creed Bratton.
• Foaming at the mouth stains less than spitting coffee when project managers tell you that you actually have minus two days to test a project, so you’d better start spinning the globe backwards like Superman immediately.
• You can pass on rabies; you cannot teach QA.
• Normal people understand what rabies is and have sympathy for it.
• The career is mercifully shorter.

On the other hand, QA pays slightly better.

Agent in place G33klady has apparently been steaming open someone else’s e-mail.  How else would she get an offer from Better Software magazine that wasn’t addressed to her?

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Certainly that’s not a defect in an untested e-mail, hey?  Someone ask the project manager over there and find out the excuse well-considered reason why this occurred and how much money the magazine saved by not testing/fixing problems.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Web site, StlToday.com, recently redesigned to great internal fanfare but not so much to user delight, has a couple of problems.  It’s hard for me to choose which part of the paper’s Web site annoys me the most, but here are some of the top candidates:

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Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software and Joel on Software says:

A long time ago, it became fashionable, even recommended, to disable menu items when they could not be used.

Don’t do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there’s some reason you can’t complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

Point of order, wealthy poobah, but, seriously, that’s adding three extra steps to the process (click something you can’t do, read why you can’t do it, and dispel the message).  Nothing’s worse than an application that lets you try to do something and then taunts you when you cannot.

Additionally, this course of action gives developers the ability to make mistakes in implementing the solution, where turning them off until explicitly needed is a simple checkbox in the IDE.  Sometimes, you can trust developers with a checkbox.

Hey, it’s the first anniversary of QAHatesYou.com.  Celebrate by perusing the archives, starting with July 9, 2007.

Over the weekend, several people told me that Pizza Hut was having trouble with its online ordering.  Some stores were apparently unable to process orders placed online, and the Web site itself offered one user this helpful message when trying to preorder:

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I love how that error message, Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand, makes it sound like it’s your browser’s fault.  Not that it’s the previous Web page that built a bad request out of its hacked-together code.

It’s not me, it’s you.  If this were vocalized, it would not be HAL’s voice.  It would be that dev team leader with the thin glasses and Van Dyke (not a freaking goatee, people!) who always explains suavely to the project manager that only QA would find error #7.56808d1.1215369972.0.  Yeah, QA and innumerable hungry people on a holiday weekend.

Speaking of which, what was it, the load this weekend?  Or an ill-timed upgrade of some sort?  Sure, a nice, long holiday weekend is a good time to make an update to a business application, but not a consumer-facing application.

A few weeks ago, ComputerWorld offered an almost helpful guideline, Narcissists at work: How to deal with arrogant, controlling, manipulative bullies.  The Narcissist is described as:

Narcissism, defined as a personality disorder by the National Institutes of Health, is a pattern of behaviors that show a pervasive need for attention and admiration, as well as a lack of concern or empathy for others.

Jean Ritala.In the workplace, says Ritala, narcissists tend to be successful and goal-oriented, with no concern for others who get in their way. They feel a need to control co-workers, projects and situations around them, and they can be manipulative, spinning situations and facts to make it appear that others around them are the problem, not them.

According to Ritala, narcissists often display the following traits at work:

• Arrogant and self-centered, they expect special treatment and privileges.
• They can be charismatic, articulate and funny.
• They are likely to disrespect boundaries and the privacy of others.
• They can be patronizing and critical of others but unwilling or unable to accept criticism or disagreement.
• Likely to be anxiety-stricken or paranoid, they may exhibit violent, rage-like reactions when they can’t control a situation or their behaviors have been exposed.
• They are apt to set others up for failure or pit co-workers against one another.
• They can be cruel and abusive to some co-workers, often targeting one person at a time until he quits.
• They may need an ongoing “narcissist supply” of people who they can easily manipulate and who will do whatever they suggest — including targeting a co-worker — without question.
• They are often charming and innocent in front of managers.

We in QA prefer to use the term developers, designers, or client account representatives for the same concept.  Whereas ComputerWorld prefers hiring a professional who coaches people on how to handle narcissists, convincing narcissists to attend counseling, and involving HR every step of the way in documenting narcissism so they can be disciplined, your Director has a simpler solution:

Hire sociopaths to counteract the narcissists.

Remember to hire a good mix of creepy/scary sociopaths and charming, manipulative sociopaths to keep the other teams in the office off-balance.  Also, remember you cannot really manage those with no moral compass but a drive for quality excellence; you have to sort of herd them.

Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  He could have also made that point about Web design if he’d lived to be 210 years old.  Case in point: This privacy statement on the Westlake Ace Feedback site:

 
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The link in the footer links to the current page, of course.  It’s like having a link labeled HOME on the index page of a site.  Sure, it’s not hurting anything, but conceptually and logically, it’s flawed, since it–based on the nature of links–acts as though it’s going to take the user somewhere else.

Additional design mockery below the fold.

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Even Slashdot, tech Web heaven, looks as though it can fall prey to problems with ad rotators:

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Oops.

When you lie down with someone else’s developers, you often get their bugs, too.

Note that the issue shown above appears to be fixed.  For now.

Or at least that’s what I infer from the compensation package offered for this job:

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Maybe I’m mistaken.  Perhaps this company is looking for some goth QA people, so it’s promising to turn them to vampires on their first day.

As of Monday, the Mozilla organization released Firefox 3 to the world. If your organization build Web sites or applications, you’re going to want to download it posthaste and add it to your browser compatibility tests.
Based on a couple of go-rounds with new browser releases, here are a couple of bullet point hints to help you accommodate this release in your plans:

• Firefox, unlike Internet Explorer, will have a rapid adoption curve. People who use Firefox tend to lean to the technically savvy, and businesses who let their users install their own browsers won’t block the upgrade. That means you won’t have to test side by side Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 for as long as you would IE. I’d recommend planning on a couple of months anyway and reviewing the Web traffic numbers after that.
• It never hurts to keep the installer for Firefox 2 around or a machine running Firefox 2 just for investigations into what the problem is when users complain.
• Once you’ve installed Firefox 3, test your already completed Web sites and applications in it to keep ahead of any problems users might see when they adopt it.
• If your organization has ongoing maintenance contracts with clients, make sure the maintenance includes time to run through the site with new browsers and fixing issues that might occur in the future.
• For fun, don’t forget the Firefox on Macintosh and Linux.

Good luck.

I was offering some confidential counseling to a former co-worker last night, Jake over at ThurisaTech who hates his boss Stan and who thinks the lead developer over there, Rick, deserves a beating, when I again alluded to the fact that technology is almost a vocation for certain elements of the IT world, namely the developers and designers who’ve been sold for the last ten years or so that IT is a vocation, not a job, and they love what they do, but not necessarily what they build.

A bunch of them over at Thurisa love what they do, but they don’t take pride in their craftsmanship, which results in shoddy applications delivered at the deadline, with about the maximum number of known issues that the client will accept before signing the check and with a vast number of other issues that the client doesn’t know about but will soon find out. Of course, those developers over at Thurisa who build those shoddy applications love what they do. They work with the latest hip technologies and they get to spend time on their own pet projects (just like Google!) and they have LAN parties on the company network. It’s just the pesky demand from clients that cuts into their enjoyment, so the real paying work has to get done quickly and sloppily. They don’t care about the ultimate workmanship in their product.

If these guys were in the manufacturing world, they’d be all agog about the new drill press machine or deburring equipment. “Look, I’m learning C# on Rails Extreme!” they say happily. “I’m punching holes in metal!” “The coffee machine here is still only a quarter!” “We could build a Web service to handle that query and expose it, enabling us to build a Facebook app that uses it!” “Oooh, a new lathe!”

A real craftsman, on the other hand, prefers to do things right and likes to have a finished product that reflects the best he could do (without the normal IT rationalizations of timeline or budget, such as “We did the best we could do with the application given our short timeline and the fact that the customer didn’t want to pay for quality.”) A craftsman recognizes the tools for what they are and knows that his skills are demonstrated not in what tools he can operate without sawing off his own thumbs, but what he can make of them that won’t fall down in a crosswind of greater than 2 miles per hour or can withstand forces of greater than 2oz per square foot no matter how cool the thing is or how quickly he built it. The IT world sadly lacks craftsmen, and it makes QA’s job that much more difficult. (Just kidding! It’s logically fallacious to assert one can make the impossible more difficult.)

Sadly, the vocational enjoyment that developers and designers live for don’t pay the bills, and without some pride in workmanship or at least the drive to do things right instead of the drive to do things cool, a company’s going to run into some trouble when its clients figure out they’re being given short shrift to technical faddery.

However, by that time, the developers will have moved onto cooler pastures without learning a lesson, and the next projects will begin with the same fundamental flaws.

Opting out of a Wall Street Journal junk mail list looks to be pretty easy, but the technical writer in me recognizes a missing step:

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If each individual question is a step, so is clicking the Submit button.

Also, the QA guy in me points out that e-mail displays inconsistently as email in the title and e-mail in the form. Poor form, Peter.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a developer poobah in Silicon Valley who happens to be a woman thinks that coding best practices are feminine by nature:

Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

Men, on the other hand:

Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, “they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. “They try to obfuscate things in the code,” and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later. McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.

The solution is best practices, filtered through the lens of femininity:

In an effort to make Ingres’s computer code more user-friendly and gender-neutral, McGrattan helped institute new coding standards at the company. They require programmers to include a detailed set of comments before each block of code explaining what the piece of code does and why; developers also must supply a detailed history of any changes they have made to the code. The rules apply to both Ingres employees and members of the open-source community who contribute code to Ingres’s products.

Also, Ingres has abandoned programming languages that use he as the pronoun placeholder in method calls (no more he.Close() for them).

Heavens to murgatroid, don’t we have enough problems getting developers male and female to not be stupid without having to turn adoption of best practices as some front in the gender war?

(Link seen on Michael Williams - Master of None.)

What do you suppose Mozilla means by this? Mozilla says Firefox 3.0 bug-free, launches RC2?

Do they mean:

• They have only tested enough to find the easy problems and have fixed those that they found.
• They have not tested at all (the no testing=no defects philosophy).
• They have reclassified all issues as known issues or have marked them as not reproducible or user error in the defect tracker.
• They do not believe that it’s an issue if a workaround, however convoluted, exists.
• They explain that only an experienced QA person would find the issue, so it’s not worth fixing.

Because, frankly, if there aren’t any open issues, you’re not trying hard enough.

I’ve never gotten one of these before:

Most of us web developers will never encounter an HTTP 414 Error. According to the W3C, 414 means:

Request-URI Too Long - The server is refusing to service the request because the Request-URI is longer than the server is willing to interpret. This rare condition is only likely to occur when a client has improperly converted a POST request to a GET request with long query information, when the client has descended into a URI “black hole” of redirection (e.g., a redirected URI prefix that points to a suffix of itself), or when the server is under attack by a client attempting to exploit security holes present in some servers using fixed-length buffers for reading or manipulating the Request-URI.

But I’m putting one on my Amazon wish list as of now.

A QA job posting on craigslist offers an interesting compensation package:

Compensation: N/A

Another job listing (not in QA) offers an unprecedented benefits package never before seen on this planet or elsewhere!

We offer unprecedented benefits to our employees. In addition to a fantastic salary base and compensation plan for all of our positions, we offer an excellent career path. We offer one of the best available benefit programs for small businesses, including healthcare plan, 401(k), long-term and short-term disability, life insurance and 3 weeks paid time off plus holidays.

Actually, I think the precedent has been set that a job has to offer these things to attract anything but unpaid interns.

I haven’t done my post on craigslist job postings for IT yet, have I? Let me put it on my to-do list.

As QAHY.com grows in popularity, we’ve started getting correspondence from around the world about quality matters:

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I want to thank all of you for your kind words and offers. Also, although I’m not interested in quality replicas, I would shell out for a good quality replicant or two, Nexus-6 models or later.

It’s hard to justify QA expenditure and effort with clear ROI sorts of metrics. Unfortunately, as this case from The Daily WTF indicates, you can sometimes very easily show what happens when you don’t invest in QA and proper testing:

It was the calm before the storm. Brokers were sitting at their desks in silence, watching the clock. The market was going to open in minutes, and huge volume orders would start pouring in. The developers working for the firm – a mid-size proprietary trading outfit on Wall Street – were already busy; an order from the previous day should’ve expired automatically, but didn’t. It was manually fixed moments after it was discovered.

“Huh,” Daniil shrugged, “I wonder if this has anything to do with the latest release.” They’d just rolled out a minor update to their proprietary trading system. Daniil had overheard his boss barking at a junior developer that they needed the feature in two days – testing, review, standard processes be damned. “Done” had a higher priority than “working.”

Unfortunately, when you can attach a monetary value to a bollix, the normal scapegoats in the testing department are already cleaning out their desks.