QA Hates You

This article might get developers’ hopes up: When Anger Is An Illness:

Scream at the boss? Snap at a colleague? Throw your cell phone into your @#$%%&* computer monitor? If so, you may find yourself headed to anger-management classes, which have become an all-purpose antidote for fit-throwing celebrities, chair-throwing coaches, vandals, road ragers, delinquent teens, disruptive airline passengers, and obstreperous employees.

Demand for such programs is coming from courts seeking alternatives to jail sentences and companies hoping to avoid lawsuits and office blowups. Aware that high-pressure jobs can make for hot tempers, some professions offer pre-emptive anger management. A few state bar associations now require “civility” training for lawyers renewing their licenses. And as of last year, hospitals must have programs for “disruptive” physicians as a condition of accreditation.

Programs run the gamut from $300-an-hour private therapists to one-day intensive seminars, weekly group sessions or online courses with no human interaction. Many advertise that they satisfy court requirements—even if all they offer is six CDs and a certificate of completion.

It’s not clear if the programs work, as few studies have analyzed their effectiveness. There are no licensing requirements for anger-management trainers—anyone can open a business. And since participants don’t usually sign up voluntarily, trainers say it’s possible to complete a program without actually changing one’s behavior.

Part of the problem is that professionals can’t agree whether a pattern of angry outbursts signals a mental illness or simply a behavior issue. As a result, people who need psychiatric help may instead get shunted into a short-term anger-management course. Employers and courts may not adequately evaluate people before sending them for anger interventions, nor provide sufficient follow-up.

No, you cannot call the mindset of QA an illness and hope it can be cured.

As a skeptic of the line of thought that thinks putting something on the Internet for convenience (and because the developers know how to do it easily and cheaply), I can heartily say that I would not want something implanted in my body that’s accessible to anyone via an IP address.

Unlike previous medical devices, the latest generation can be controlled automatically or remotely over the Internet. The benefits are obvious–they allow patients much greater mobility and the need for daily trips to a doctor’s office are obviated. In addition, these devices can dramatically lower health care costs, guaranteeing their wider user and acceptance moving forward.

…

While nobody worried about the 6 Million Dollar Man being hacked, the time has come to seriously consider the security protocols, or lack thereof, of today’s modern medical devices. As the story below indicates, the integration of technology into the human body has created opportunities for newer and more serious forms computer crime and hacking. In the past, a hacker might have been able to illegally enter a desktop computer system, read a targets personal data or even gain control of another person’s financial accounts. In comparison to the potential threat from Internet-based medical devices, the threats from “old-school” hacking seem mild by comparison.

This goes pretty much for any critical infrastructure. You, there, testing embedded devices, manufacturing controls, transformers, and so on. Seriously, isn’t it worth a little effort (okay, a lot of extra effort) to put that on a secure, dedicated network to make sure that some punk in Montreal doesn’t kill someone with your product?

Hey, I finally upgraded Wordpress here, so let me know if you run into any weirdness.  It looks as though the migration lost all user accounts, so you’ll have to register again to comment.  Also, I’ll have to rebuild the blogroll since that, too, is lost.

However, now it will handle YouTube videos correctly, so we’ll get back to the weekly QA anthems.

Thank you, that is all.

That’s obsessive-compulsive disorder with the letters in alphabetical order.

Cartoon Tester shows how you can spot a tester in a supermarket.

When he was drawing me, I would have preferred that Mr. Glover had gotten my good side, but you take what you get.  Because he certainly captures my essence, and probably many of yours.  When I get a kiosk or console of any sort, I reflexively try some boundary analysis and exploratory testing, even before I use the kiosk for whatever I need to use it for.

Maybe we can draw a lesson from manufacturing quality processes to apply to SQA.  Here’s an article on How Lean Manufacturing Can Backfire:

But Toyota’s recent problems highlight how certain elements of this approach—eliminating overlap by using common parts and designs across multiple product lines, and reducing the number of suppliers to procure parts in greater scale—can backfire when quality-control issues arise.

What’s the software equivalent?  Open source components and reliance on third party integrations.

You know I bang on the drum of distrusting anything that your company doesn’t develop even more than you distrust anything that your company does develop.  However, you can now use the Toyota recall as a metaphor for how that can break and can pervasively impact your software.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal conducted a survey and came up with 7 things developers think.  Of course, they asked developers, so the developers answered, and CIOs are supposed to use these truths to define their IT strategies.  Huh.

Here’s the abbreviated list from the magazine:

1. RIAs Are For Real
2. Wide Use Of Open Source
3. Virtualization, Cloud Use Evolves
4. Multilingual Developers Emerge
5. Young Developers Drawn To Dynamic Languages
6. Agile Processes Resonate
7. Developers As An Untapped Source Of Innovation

You want to know what those developers are really thinking?  Here, let QA tell you:

1. RIAs Are For Real
   I need to get RIA work on my resume.  Can we do something with them?
2. Wide Use Of Open Source
   I have no budget.  Alternatively, I started using this stuff when I was in college because I had no budget then, and we’re going to use it now even though more robust solutions are available because I’m comfortable with them.  Also, I can get bits and pieces of the application I’m writing from some server in the Czech Republic for free, and by the time you’re sued for using it without paying for it/the Russians steal not only our customers’ identities but some of their pets as well, I will be using my RIA experience in a higher paying architect position.
3. Virtualization, Cloud Use Evolves
   Cloud is awesome because I can just slam code up there without putting it through a build process/testing/a second thought at all.
4. Multilingual Developers Emerge
   I’ve been job hopping so much, I don’t have time nor the attention span to actually learn a single language enough to learn it thoroughly.
5. Young Developers Drawn To Dynamic Languages
   Hey!  Something shiny! 
6. Agile Processes Resonate
   Formalizing all the foolish, thoughtless, and unforesighted things I would normally do?  Sign me up!  I’ll call it agile, and the business interests won’t know the difference.
7. Developers As An Untapped Source Of Innovation
   I am a genius, like Ricola Tesla.  Listen to me, and make me an executive, now, you twit!

There, now you know.  And you can discard whatever a developer tells you and get on with business.

Shaktoolik: The feeling that you have when you have been going toward a place for so long that it seems that you will never get there.

Be sure to use that word in a meeting about the current project that keeps getting features added, changes made, and the client’s whimsy indulged while the release date recedes into the future.

(Word source.)

Copyranter goes off on print and broadcast advertising.  Warning, though: He talks a lot about how sex is used to sell things, particularly overseas, so the content might not be safe for work unless you work for an interactive agency, where that sort of thing is appreciated.

copyranter.blogspot.com

Here’s a little hint on things to look for when your team decides on product names:  Unfortunate Names blog.

Remember, someone has to pipe up and scotch the bad ideas, and the dreamers (read: the designers, the developers, the project managers, the client account managers, the clients) aren’t grounded enough to say, “Uh, guys?  Flooz? That would make users floozies.”

Dustbury notes an error in a footer:

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Ah, what the hell, it’s an imported problem, so it’s not really a problem, eh?

(He said in a Canadian accent, implying another layer of international conspiracy, sending those conspiracy theorists into a tizzy.  QA understands there is no international conspiracy, only entropy at work.)

A media player keeps timing out on me, delivering this error which sounds like it’s taunting me:

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NaNNaNNaN!  You can’t listen!

You, QA, probably won’t need this; however, you should share this with your barely-literate coworkers who put copy in front of users: 10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling.

Courtesy the twitterverse.

Make sure you have a hand in educating the people who will handle print communications relating to your Web sites, especially the URLs.  Because someone who doesn’t understand URLs and how they work can easily make a simple mistake, like this:

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Note the additional period in the one.  If your user types that into the browser, the user gets a 404:

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Here are some other things that they will do to your URLs that will render them inoperative:

• They put spaces between the words in a URL, like www.qa hates you.com.
• They wrap URLs onto other lines by adding a hyphen that doesn’t belong, such as www.qa-
  hatesyou.com.

If you can think of any others, throw them in the comments.

Now, what can you do about it?

If you’re like me, you put the proofreaders within your organization in the QA department or task some of your people to look over marketing materials.  The same people who proof your Web copy can proof your marketing materials.  At the very least, you should take some interest in educating your copywriters and proofreaders into the nature of URLs and what they should not do to them.

Because when a user or consumer comes along and can’t reach your Web site, you know whose fault it is?  Your Web site’s.  Or your company’s.  Either way, you’re dinged.

From 2005, or, as it is known in Internet time, the world before Time, a group of people got together to defeat an unkillable monster in EverQuest and did because its immortality was a kludge.

You know what gets me to open a sales e-mail?  Promising me a BOGO.  As this e-mail does, but does it deliver?

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Do you see the BOGO?  I’m sure you can spot the TYPOs, but those are different things.  What, nothing explains what the BOGO is?

BOGO is marketing speak for Buy One, Get One.  Unfortunately, EZ Vacuum uses internal argot and expects you to know what it is.

How do they sell vacuum supplies so cheap?  They eliminate the proofreaders and professional designers and have the CEO’s nephew and the rest of his kindergarten class create the e-mail and pass that savings on to you!

The QAHY World Headquarters recently moved from the St. Louis, Missouri, area to the Springfield, Missouri, area.  That’s about 3 hours travel time if you test the state highway patrol’s speed limit enforcement.

Verizon, which handles the wireless needs of QAHY and its subsidiaries, partially caught on to the move as the following marketing material indicates:

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Procedurally speaking, it would make sense to me to have the promotional material draw nearest store addresses from the address to which the promotional material is going, not to the previous address (or to the current billing address, which I hadn’t changed to that point).

But then again, I am just a customer.  Who’s not going to drive 3 hours to trade in a functional phone for a more expensive model.

The wonders of social media integration leads to this juxtaposition:

Oh, yes, their marketing team felt clever and they got to use the greatest technology ever, padding their resumes.  However, when you allow dynamic content of the lowest common denominator (don’t forget to follow me, the lowest common numerator, on Twitter, the greatest technology ever!), you allow for this sort of thing.

Think of the fun if that Twitter account gets hacked!  Think of the fun when the Fail Whale appears on the billboard or Twitter returns one of its frequent errors.

Some people have no pride.

UPDATE: In an unrelated note, Facebook points out that one of its more annoying apps, FarmVille, has more players than Twitter has users.  Keep that in mind when figuring out how much budget you should blow on that particular interactive bucket.

Rub the Estimate Goat whenever you need to come up with those project numbers.  It’s more efficient than puzzling over dependencies, tasks, and whatnot and not accounting for the unknown.  And probably just as accurate!

(Link courtesy of the Twitterverse.)

You know, I would almost think my work’s done if only the project manager would exclaim to me:

Bird of ill omen, pessimist, explain yourself!

I say almost because my work would be done if the project manager were tearfully exclaiming it.  And a burly ex-military sort.

For your consideration: The Benefits of Pissing People Off.

Although the author is talking about leadership and building, not QA specifically.

In QA, you cannot ultimately do your job without pissing people off.  Granted, you can get a job in QA and hold onto it for a good long time with a get-along attitude, but you’re probably not helping to release software of any better quality than if they didn’t have you sucking up a salary.