QA Hates You

You know what you need to add to your standard testing repertoire?

On a recent Monday morning, inside an unremarkable, low-slung building in Yonkers, N.Y., blue-coated technicians conducted lab work. Among their calibrated tools: Cheez Whiz, pig’s blood and Maine coon cat hair.

They’re testers for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and website whose ratings drive spending decisions on some 3,000 product models annually, from vacuums and lawn mowers to strollers, shower heads and smoothies.

That’s some boundary analysis I wish I could try.

In the lab, technicians are always developing ways to accelerate the wear and tear products normally experience over the course of years. Treadmills, for instance, get pounded repeatedly with a spinning metal drum imbedded with rubber green balls that mimic running feet. (The device’s nickname: Johnnie Walker.) Stainless-steel grills are stationed in a conditioning chamber and pelted with a salty spray to test for rust potential. Sometimes the goal is to mimic extreme scenarios, like an accident, in which bicycle helmets get strapped on a metal head form and dropped from various heights onto sharp and rounded objects.

I try to apply that same sort of creativity when I face an application.

Meanwhile, do you suppose mechanical engineers around the world post comments on the Consumer Reports Web site about how no one would do that? Probably not, because unlike software “engineers,” mechanical engineers have a sense of shame.

Don’t be held in contempt for Selenium discharges:

Patriot Coal Corp. was found in contempt of court by a federal judge on Wednesday and ordered to clean up selenium pollution at two mines in West Virginia.

I guess that’s not something a tester is going to do necessarily, but I don’t think it’s effective branding for the automated testing product.

The instructions for this database of teacher salaries in Missouri has an interesting example:

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The instructions? – To see results for people with the last name of “Null” type in Null*.

Hey, that’s always a good idea. What happens if I search for/enter null?

In this case, we discover that there are a lot of Nulls making good money teaching in the state of Missouri.

But I can tell a lot of thought went into writing that sample search term. Thought that could better have been spent on the title tag for the page.

Found on the Twitterverse: 10 things non-technical users don’t understand about your software:

If you are writing consumer software you have to understand that you and your average user have a very different level of understanding of computers. When you first start doing support it can be a shock to realize just how vast this gulf is. It doesn’t mean that your users are stupid, just that they haven’t spent the thousands of hours in front of a computer that you have.

This echoes the Roberta scenario that I outlined earlier. When your development staff and design staff get together to design something, they need to remember that not everycat is as hep as they are, dig? Complication, and deviation from other interface standards, will induce user error, and the worst bugs of all are the bugged users.

It’s not as legitimate as the Indians making up a new symbol for the rupee, but a company in Michigan has made up its own punctuation and is happy to sell the character to you for $1.99:

A Michigan company announced the release of software Tuesday that introduces new punctuation to the typed word: The sarcasm mark.

Sarcasm Inc. of Washington Township said the SarcMark, which resembles an open circle with a dot in the center, can be installed on computers via a program that can be downloaded from sarcmark.com for $1.99.

It’s almost worth $1.99 just for how much it will annoy your developers.

(Link seen here.)

You’ve heard of the Twitter Fail Whale? Here’s the BBC Fail Clown:

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Try harder to not fail again, or again you must face the creepy dead clown.

Remember when Google held a mock funeral for IE6, and the designers had a party?

Do you think they’ll do the same if Flash goes the way of the dodo?

I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.

So, who’s up for some Silverlight?

(Link seen here.)

More Motley Crue for you:

If you can shout at the devil, you can certainly convince that developer that a blue screen probably is a critical defect and not a medium, fix-if-we-have-time priority.

A quote in the back of a Baseline magazine got me to thinking.

When asked to characterize their ability to thwart internal breaches, only 34% of respondents are ‘very confident,’ but that response rises to 56 percent [sic] when respondents are asked about their ability to thwart external breaches. – Deloitte’s 2010 Financial Services Security Survey

Frankly, in the QAHY school of QA philosophy, any confidence is overconfidence. If you think you’re catching the bugs and are ready to open the bar, you’re probably missing something, and it’s not going to miss you.

MelBugai asked:

Anyone seen this software testing company before? I’m so very skeptical, http://www.testing4success.com/

A testing company that uses a number instead of a word in its name? Dubious. One looking for resources, and by “resources,” I mean “Volunteers”:

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I could do actual work for you, and I get to include that on my resume? Let me think about that. Sounds about as much fun as testing an open source project, except with the knowledge that you’re making money from my servitude.

I just have to ask you one question: if you’re hiring experienced tester who are working for free even though you’re paying for it, what sort of service do you think you’re getting?

To keep spam down and whatnot, I delete a lot of new user registrations if they don’t look like they have QA names or e-mail addresses, if I don’t recognize the name, or if you don’t immediately leave a comment. I apologize if I’ve deleted your user account by mistake. This means you, Petr, for sure and maybe some others.

So if you want a user account on the site, be sure to pipe up.

This trip was restful.

Although, to be honest, tracking down some bugs is harder.

Microsoft slates IE9 beta for September.

It will be interesting on how this shakes out. Will it finally inspire corporations to move completely from IE 6? Or will it only add a new IE to our testing plan as the new release cannibalizes from IE 7 and 8?

A lot of management types will hope this provides a stake for the old IE 6, but I tend to think it will prove an upgrade for organizations that already upgrade.

Still, something to which you will want to pay attention to and for which you will need to account in your test plans.

A couple weeks back (which means it’s now available on the Web), Larry O’Brien covered user testing to show that development shops could actually, you know, see how users work with a software tool.

Nut grafs:

There’s a part of me that loves user testing; the same part that enjoys visiting ThereIFixedIt.com and watching videos of people destroying their trucks by felling trees on top of them. I take comfort in believing, however briefly, that there are people more foolish than myself. My source code often makes me despair of my own sentience, but I like to tell myself that I wouldn’t need to be prompted to use a button marked “search.”

My major reaction to user testing, though, is often resignation. User testing invariably reveals distasteful work—layouts that need total reworking, dead-end navigation paths, and corner cases that the library API doesn’t cover. The interesting algorithmic stuff that you developed while surrounded by a stack of heavily annotated journal articles and intently pored over on a statement-by-statement basis? That stuff works fine.

Unfortunately, the temptation to skip user testing is often encouraged by clients. While experienced developers know that user testing will lead to a certain amount of dismay, inexperienced clients dismiss user testing because they’re invariably overconfident. I don’t think many are as bad as my above-mentioned client, who was confident that word would spread like wildfire that one could cycle colors by directly clicking on the product. More generally, the problem is the opposite: Clients have seen so many mockups and prototypes and test versions that they cannot see it with fresh eyes.

Keep in mind, QA, in all the situations where your organization is too cheap to provide user testing, you have to be the eyes of the user. Designers love their cutting edge design, but applications should not make only as much sense as a Christo or Serra installation. Applications should behave more or less like all the other applications in the whole world regardless for how much disdain the developers have for the bourgeois sensibilities of users. And so on and so forth.

But read O’Brien’s piece as usual.

An author identifies some of the ways Starbucks order taking and processing mirrors software:

I just returned from a 2 week trip to Japan. One of the more familiar sights was the ridiculous number of Starbucks coffee shops, especially around Shinjuku and Roppongi. While waiting for my “Hotto Cocoa” I started to think about how Starbucks processes drink orders. Starbucks, like most other businesses is primarily interested in maximizing throughput of orders. More orders equals more revenue. As a result they use asynchronous processing.

That’s all well and good, but we here at QAHY want to extend the metaphor further.

Ways Starbucks is like a development team:

• They’re very expensive for what you get.
• Anything besides the basic product costs extra.
• The customer is the only QA.
• Those who participate believe their in a superior class, but the rest of us use the word clique.

Ways Starbucks is not like your development team:

• Starbucks produces the same thing over and over again, so they get good at it, unlike your development team who build slightly different things using new technologies they want to learn on the fly. It’s like having every barrista be a trainee every day.
• Barristas won’t try to adjust a drink if the order changes in midstream. They rightfully throw it out and start again and sometimes charge you again. A development team will just try to remix the existing espresso, sugar, and flavor shot so that you get hot chocolate at the end instead of a triple Venti cappuccino.
• Starbucks gets its money up front and doesn’t have to wheedle and do just one more thing to get its paycheck.
• You like to see a Starbucks product or representative first thing in the morning.

And in closing, I’d like to point out that management from your software development team could probably run a Starbucks, but not vice versa.

Feel free to add your own below.

(Link seen on Megan McArdle via Instapundit. That’s enough chain of custody to introduce it as evidence, werd.)

I was reviewing this user interface designed in an old technology, when suddenly I was struck by the infeasibility of the maxlengths assigned to the fields:

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That’s a maximum e-mail address of 20 characters. Chop 4 or 5 off for the domain extension, the dot, and the @ sign and suddenly you’re limited to a username and a domain name of 15-16 characters. If you’re not at MSN or AOL and an early adopter at that, you’d better hope that they call you on the phone if you’ve won.

Okay, aside from that, what’s the other problem on the page?

India has given itself a new symbol for its currency, the rupee:

More information at Wikipedia, including the nugget that this will not replace the existing Unicode character ₨which, as I understand it, will henceforth represent Ru Paul.

So how will your application like that? I can’t wait to find out.

The Dark Side of Perfectionism Revealed:

Perfectionists, by definition, strive for the best, trying to ace exams, be meticulous at their jobs, and raise perfect children. So one might assume this drive for the ideal translates over to their health as well, with perfectionist being models for physical and mental well-being.

But new research is revealing the trait can bring both profits and perils.

Though perfection is an impossible goal, striving for it can be a boon for one’s health, causing one to stick to exercise programs to a tee, say, or follow a strict regimen for treating chronic illnesses like type 2 diabetes. But the same lofty goals can mean added mental pressure when mistakes are made and the resistance to asking for help from others in fear of revealing one’s true, imperfect self.

In fact studies show the personality trait of perfectionism is linked to poor physical health and an increased risk of death.

Well, I am not in it for my health. I’m in it for the respect and love of my fellow software professionals.

Which means I’ll die young and lonely, but that’s better than dying old and lonely.

(Link seen at Troglopundit.)

e-week offers a slideshow of current software development slang.

Personally, I take the number of definitions that relate to bugs and lack of quality as a metric indicating how bad software code is in the industry today.

As if I needed further evidence than actually using software on a daily basis, not including the stuff I test.

Apparently, Google’s use of the Beta tag isn’t keeping it out of a lawsuit:

In a frivolous lawsuit that ranks right up there with people suing McDonald’s for burning themselves drinking hot coffee, a woman is suing Google because she claims Google Maps directions led her to a highway, where she was struck by a car.

Sure, the lawsuit probably won’t go anywhere. But Google’s going to have to spend precious coin responding to the papers and whatnot. If the lawsuit gets some traction, Google’s going to have to settle or whatnot.

Keep that in mind whenever your organization pushes something “quick and dirty” live, or when it takes shortcuts with the initial development and promises to fix the shortcomings, bugs, and oversights with later release which will be under the same sort of pressure and process for the new features as was the initial development (that is, the new features are slapped on barely tested and with no bug fixing or revisiting clunky workflow), or when it hides behind a “beta” tag hoping that only smart users will use the application according to the happy path but that might find users are not as clever at sussing out the happy path as are the dev team.

You’re buying a Daily Pick 5 ticket with that philosophy. Sure, your number probably won’t come up, but you’re playing the drawing every day, and if it comes up, you’re going to lose enough to make you wish you had done things a little differently every day.