QA Hates You

Here’s the heartwarming story of an advertising agency that was on top of the world five years ago, but isn’t any more: The King’s Comeuppance: How the hottest ad agency of the aughts fell from grace.

Key paragraph:

“They’re much more important than the client, in their minds,” says Peter De Lorenzo, editor in chief of the car commentary site AutoExtremist.com. “They make ads to amuse themselves.”

Holy cats, that’s a bunch of people in software development, too, ainna?

The guy doesn’t build UIs, but he does use them. And he doesn’t like some elements of them.

I don’t normally work in the UX/UI design world, but I know enough from constantly filling out web forms that too many designs out there are destined for a special ring of data Hell. If you’ve followed any of my web form rants on Twitter, you may have heard this before…but it should be repeated.

Go learn his list of peccadilloes and think about your own. Then, bother your designers and developers when they do something convenient for themselves once, but annoying to users thousands of times.

(Thanks to gimlet for the link.)

Find some of my other work elsewhere on the Web:

“Trouble Tickets Are Your Business” in ST & QA Magazine.

Book recommendations in The Testing Circus.

The software development community has an axis of partisans that runs from those who want to view themselves either as free-wheeling creative types channeling form out of the aether and putting it beautifully, elegantly into code to those who view themselves as white-suited scientists or engineers reasoning natural laws and applying those laws to GUIs. Hence, we get a constant stream of articles like this one, “Software engineering: Art or science?” from the November 8, 2011, SD Times magazine. November 8? Jeez, how deep is the pile of things on the left wing of my desk?

Point of order, Mr. Chairman: Software development is neither art nor science.

Were it art, the product would be meaningful only in invoking thought or providing a comforting sense of beauty. I mean, you don’t use a painting or a concerto for something other than enjoying the painting or concerto. Unless you’re breaking prisoners of war with them or something.

Were it science, the product could be replicated over and over again by others in other organizations and come up with the exact same result. I’m not talking about duplicating CDs or packaging distros; I mean when one wanted to connect to a database, one would use the proven method that had been established, basically, by Isaac Newton. Software development is not that way; its experiments–that is, the development of individual projects or products–do not yield a similar result when done over a series of time and in different location.

What is software development, then? It is handicrafts.

• The end product does something. The end of the coding process is not some pretty Matrix-drizzle of green numbers to make everything pretty. The end of the coding process is some sort of tool. Ergo, the application is not a work of art. While crafting often produces just art, in other cases it produces something that does something else, however twee. Quilting produces a device that retains heat; woodworking produces furniture. And so on.
   
• The end product is unique. Assuming you’ve built a phonebook database, a Web site that allows users to enter into a sweepstakes, or a Web service that seeks and receives data from a database to dish to a presentation layer somewhere, you’ve built something different from all the others that have been built before, even those that do the exact same thing. If this were science, your process would yield a finished result that matched the others.
   
• The end product bears certain trademarks of the craftsmen. Come on, your fingerprints and foibles are all over your software. The tweaks and ways you do things are different from everyone else’s, and someone who’s familiar with your work and with the industry will see your marks on what you’ve done.
   
• Each end product will have unique defects. In handicrafting, it might be a little glue showing in the gaps of bonded surfaces, maybe a little nesting somewhere in a seam. Maybe they won’t be glaringly obvious, and only another craftsman will see them. Maybe they’re obvious enough that nobody will buy them from your table in the bazaar. Regardless, the defects will be unique to the product, and your other products even if they’re very similar products will have different defects. Or maybe you make the same mistakes over and over and your defects are your trademark.
   
• Best practices and technologies are faddish. The things you’re coding in and the ways you’re doing it are not necessarily the end result of some evolution or even rational processes. They might just be what someone read in a magazine and thought would be worth a try. Evaluating the practices’ effectiveness might become secondary to trying something novel. I know how to paint the glass into which I pour my candles–what if I try etching the glass? What, indeed?
   
• Truth does not determine what tools or technologies you use. You know, for that pyrography design, perhaps a wire nib is called for. However, your budget only allows enough for a cheap Walnut Hollow solid nib woodburning kit. As in software development, sometimes the “best” tool is the open-source product that meets some subset of your needs, but it’s free. So you make do. Like a scientist working with studying particles with a Moderately Sized Hadron Collider.
   
• The craftsmen are more like gossipy ladies at the Singer sewing classes than steely-eyed doctors. I mean, granted, even steely-eyed scientists can be a gossipy lot, but. Any time your craftsmen speak from authority, they’re speaking from some experience, some faddish magazine or blog articles, and/or some education, but they’re not as ex cathedra as they’d like you to think.

Does the metaphor break down? Assuredly. I am a mere craftsman. But if you try to pour software development into some metaphor to make it comprehensible to non-IT people, you could do worse. Like saying it’s an art or a science.

Because I think I need some more Aries on my team.

I’ve mentioned early and often that people used WebTV in 2005 and that I encouraged my employer at the time to account for that browser on its Web sites.

It’s 2011. Surely you can not consider a twentieth century technology now, right?

Well, here’s an indication that they’re still out there:

And trying to use Facebook, a modern gee-whizzed up Web site.

Feeling all excited about the prophecied end of IE 6? Microsoft hasn’t completely killed WebTV / MSN TV yet.

Microsoft continues to support the subscription service for existing WebTV and MSN TV customers.

(An explanation of “Roberta” here.)

Penny Arcade today has a long chain of emails that transpire when a customer is disappointed with an arcade controller’s long delivery time and the eventual tone of the distributor when responding to his concerned emails over the course of two months. A taste:

From: Dave
To: Ocean Marketing
Dec 26, 2011, at 9:47 AM

I noticed the updated info on the webpage, and I don’t understand why there is absolutely no benefit given to those like me who have already ordered, and paid their money. You’ve had my money interest free for nearly two months, yet now ANY new order will get $10 off….meaning I should just cancel my order for 2 controllers, get my money back, then re-order.

My other questions is regarding item compatibility. Ocean Marketing seems to be involved with the Xtendplay controller holder, so I was wondering if the Avenger N-Controller can be used in conjunction with the Xtendplay (for both Xbox and PS3)? Thanks

From: Ocean Marketing
To: Dave
Dec 26, 2011 10:14 AM

Yes it can be used with xtend play if you remove the stand and no one is allowed to cancel and re order if we catch anyone doing it we will simply just cancel your order all together and you can buy it retail somewhere else.

Things happen in manufacturing if your unhappy you have 7 days from the day your item ships for a refund. You placed a pre order just like any software title the gets a date moved due to the tweaks and bugs not being worked out and GameStop or any other place holds your cash and im sure you don’t complain to activision or epic games so put on your big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else. The benefit is a token of our appreaciation for everyone no one is special including you or any first time buyer . Feel free to cancel we need the units were back ordered 11,000 units so your 2 will be gone fast. Maybe I’ll put them on eBay for 150.00 myself. Have a good day Dan.

When JasonS. alerted me to this story, I immediately thought about how I see similar attitudes when dealing with software releases and excuses for not fixing defects.

I mean, you get the normal arrogance of developers combined with a risk-to-punishment reasoning that says, “If the bug just happens to one person, it’s cool. Or at least it’s not a problem worth worrying about.”

Unless, of course, it’s a vocal user who then speaks up about problems he or she has and that others probably encounter. Then the value of your application drops in all users’ eyes as the Internet clogs with stories of YourApplicationSucks.com.

Your application and its interface are customer service and support. Think about the worst phone tree you endured to make something right or the worst bunch of “dropped” calls and runarounds you got that didn’t make something right. Is that your application in your users’ eyes?

Frankly, I think this is what the Mayans were talking about: NFL playoffs, Super Bowl to be streamed online:

Football’s big game is coming to the small screen.

For the first time ever the Super Bowl, along with some postseason NFL games, will be streamed online and through the league’s mobile apps, the NFL and partner Verizon Wireless announced Tuesday.

Good luck with that.

So what’s going to happen to your sites and applications when third party Internet calls start timing out because the whole Internet is going to be running at half speed?

IBM promises, in an ad:

There’s a lot of sugar in the gas tank if your car is fueled by software:

Car manufacturer Jaguar has had to recall nearly 18,000 of its X-Type cars after a serious software bug has been identified in the on-board system of the vehicle. The bug potentially stops a driver from turning off the cruise control system, which is more than a little dangerous.

Yeah, I know it’s an old story, but it took me a couple months after seeing the story to see again the advertisement it reminded me of.

Now, here’s this: Now Every Company Is A Software Company:

Ford sells computers-on-wheels. McKinsey hawks consulting-in-a-box. FedEx boasts a developer skunkworks. The era of separating traditional industries and technology industries is over—and those who fail to adapt right now will soon find themselves obsolete.

On one hand, hey, job opportunities if every company is a good software company and hires some QA people. On the other hand, the whole world is going to become even more buggy than it is now.

Here’s a good post on problems with estimates: 8 Reasons Why the Estimates Are Too Low.

To which I add number 9:

9. Building the estimate based on the deadline or budget.
    
   Starting with the client’s budget or required go-live date, the estimate is put together to reflect how that number of hours or days will be spent. The estimate is not, therefore, based on any earnest guess at actual effort on the tasks at hand.

We’ve all been in on one of those projects.

(Link seen via tweet.)

You see the parades outside your window right now? That’s the whole Web development world spontaneously reacting to the news that Microsoft is going to automatically background update Internet Explorer:

Microsoft today said it will silently upgrade Internet Explorer (IE) starting next month, arguing that taking the responsibility out of the hands of users will keep the Web safer.

That will take it out of the hands of the consumer and end user. But the enterprise users? Not so much:

Microsoft’s scheme differs from either Mozilla’s or Google’s, however, in that the company will let enterprises retain control of upgrades.

This means that all those corporate networks who are still running 10-year-old applications custom-crafted to work with IE 6 will still keep their desktops running IE 6, and all their employees who browse from work will still use IE 6 to visit your sites.

Further:

Nor will it force updates on consumers who have already declined earlier offers to abandon an older IE.

So people who have explicitly opted out of upgrading that one time several years ago when they didn’t read what they were clicking, they won’t get the upgrade, either.

And Roberta, out there surfing the Internet on a machine that does not support the new gimcracks and gee-gaws like IE 9? She’ll still be tooling along on IE 6.

So, ultimately, what does it mean? Well, it means Microsoft got into the news again. Good job, PR staff!

It also means you need to explore whether you need to install one of the toolkits to block the automated updates on your test machines to ensure you continue to have backward compatibility to test the sites until such time as those IE usage numbers really start to fall off. (You can find them here: 7, 8, 9.)

Don’t base your test strategies and your compatibility matrices on press releases or Microsoft blog posts.

On the wrong side of the table. Matt Heusser on being in IT over the age of 35:

No, what struck me were the people.

All of the people I met — and I mean all of them — had this sort of early-twenties look to them. Like the characters in Microserfs, these were “firstees”, young adults in the middle of the first things like life: First job out of college, first house, first child, first mini-van.

All of them.

The google t-shirts, while not universal, were ubiquitous; you couldn’t walk twenty feet without running into someone in Google-wear. Conversations about relocation tended to center on corporate housing, which sounded well … something between a good room and an apartment.

Well, I should be careful, here. Every now and again you’d run into someone in his early 30’s, trying to act inconspicuous, perhaps with a beard, glasses, or both.

These were the managers, almost certainly on their first management job.

I mean, these are people who refer to the extra weight you gain in the first six month as the “freshman fifteen.”

With my grey hair and, and, well, senior sixty, I kinda stuck out like a sore thumb.

I’ve sat in on a couple of those interviews, with a resume that stretches back over a decade and that still lists technologies like RoboHelp, WinRunner, and OpenVMS in the furthest reaches of ancient history (the 20th Century? How….quaint).

You know what else the urchins have highlighted? The fact that I have an English and Philosophy degree, and not a modern 21st century computer science degree like they do.

What should someone on the other side of 35 do? Pretty much what Matt says. But I’d like to offer the following additional tips, old man:

• Stop making allusions to Mel Brooks movies and go find Harold and Kumar films. Suffer through them and make some appropriate quips. It’s for your career, so some sacrifice is in order. Remember: If it’s older than Napoleon Dynamite, you might as well be quoting Spencer Tracy.
   
• Clash of the Titans and Conan the Barbarian both sucked because those damn kids only know the remakes.
   
• Pink Floyd? Hardly. Sublime meaning and musical depth to your future bosses comes from Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas. Put some of that on your iTunes, senior. But lie and say they’re on your Spotify list.
   
• Take your hearing aids out. It’s not like you need to hear the questions since you’re just going to tell them about how you want to get CI experience. They don’t have to know you hope the medical benefits include a cochlear implant.
   
• Don’t think it’s cool to talk about Dungeons and Dragons. These children have never seen graph paper, even in math class.
   
• Don’t tell them about your blog. Anything over 140 characters long is boring, square.
   
• Mention reading anything on paper at your own risk.

…. …., … ….

I SAID, “GOOD LUCK, OLD MAN.”

The Startup: A Less Productive Alternative to Unemployment — powered by Cracked.com

Working off site is cool, because the mute button can hide your screams.

Ford owners getting a software update for their vehicles will have the chance to perform the software updates themselves:

If you’re on of the 300,000 or so customers out there with MyFord Touch, you’re already on the list to receive a USB flash drive containing the update. You’ll be able to do it yourself or take it to any dealership.

With this major upgrade, Ford is delivering on their promise to keep your tech up-to-date as long as you own the car. “Evolving the software with meaningful enhanced features was part of our plan from the very beginning. It’s no different than the experience with our smartphones and laptop computers – except now, it’s your car that gets better,” Jablonski added.

You can find tips on testing software installers here.

(Link seen here, along with the quip “Is it possible to brick an entire car? We’re about to find out.”)

The leader of the largest independent advertising company does it differently:

After more than four decades in business, there are certain things that Stan Richards, the 78-year-old founder of The Richards Group, believes to be true. Employees, for one, must arrive by 8:30 a.m. (not 8:30-ish-they have to punch in). Time spent on the job must be accounted for in 15-minute increments, daily. Fail to do so, and you’ll be docked $8.63. Arrive promptly to meetings or be shut out of them. Close of business is 6 p.m. Finish your work and go home.

Given all that, you could be forgiven for concluding that Richards runs a widgetmaker or a call center or a print shop—the kind of operation in which work needs to be highly regimented to get done efficiently. In fact, The Richards Group is an advertising agency.

And not just any advertising agency. Founded in 1976, The Richards Group is the largest independently owned ad shop in the country, with billings of $1.28 billion, revenue of $170 million, and more than 650 employees. Its portfolio is packed with some of the most memorable campaigns of the past 30 years. Chick-fil-A’s famous cows, those alluring Corona beer ads with couples lounging on the beach, Motel 6′s “We’ll Leave the Light on for You”… all were born at Richards’s Dallas headquarters. Most recently, and infamously, the agency went perhaps a bit too far, sparking a nationwide controversy with a set of startlingly direct ads for Summer’s Eve cleansing wash. The spots declared “Hail to the V”; some cheekily used hand puppets to play the roles of multiracial talking vaginas.

Highly structured and rules-bound companies, of course, are not supposed to produce work like this. “Creative” industries such as advertising, software design, and the like are supposed to require a loose, anything-goes culture, in which workers are free to come, go, and dress as they please. It’s a world of verdant campuses, foosball tables, and caffeine-fueled all nighters. Introduce things such as start times, end times, and time sheets—rules—and watch your creatives run for the exits. Richards, obviously, feels differently. “We need to be disciplined,” he explains. “We are not gallery painters who paint when the feeling moves us.” And Richards has made it work. The 29 creative group heads at Richards’s shop have an average tenure of 17 years. “The genius of the place is completely counterintuitive,” says David Fowler, who wrote the landmark Motel 6 spots back in 1986 and today is the executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather in New York City. “Somehow, Stan made you feel like you were only limited by the size of your ideas.”

A lot of organizations run towards the latest fads in development methodology or towards the common pop-culture representations of how things are done, but different organizations can succeed outside the vogue. One wonders if this agency would have reached that level of success doing things differently, that is, like everyone else does. I doubt it.

A profile in the Wall Street Journal identifies a costly boundary analysis failure for Amazon.com:

At launch, the site wasn’t even truly finished. Mr. Bezos’s philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it. Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos: “We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books.”

Remember, 0 isn’t the smallest number to test.

You know the common first program given in any class displays the phrase Hello World on the computer screen?

Yeah, that’s starting them off right. With a defect.

The “world” is a noun of direct address. Ergo, the phrase lacks a comma and should be Hello, world.

Speaking of classes, I’ve taken a couple or four language programming classes in the community college, and although they’ve focused on writing applications (or ceaselessly computing meaningless formulas using Java arrays) that do what they’re supposed to, but instructors never mentioned implications of quality assurance and testing. Maybe they thought the program would include it later, but at the time (the late 1990s), kids were coming into the field with nothing but those couple of classes at the community college. Those same kids are now the VPs. Makes sense, don’t you think?

Larry Tieman in Information Week talks about how to avoid career-killing software projects and mentions the importance of elevating QA to an equal position as development:

Testing the software is yet another opportunity to bring in an independent perspective and reduce risk. Several years ago, I converted an application VP position to a testing VP position and formed an independent test organization. My intention was to put testing on the same footing as development, improve the quality of critical software, and give me another voice in a project. That VP also reported directly to me.

As you might know, I’m a big proponent of this sort of organization, partly because I was in a similar position in my last full-time posting as a Director who reported directly to the CEO and got to unabashedly air grievances where they would be heard.

Your quality assurance should not just be a cog in your development wheel where the process keeps rolling regardless. QA should be a log in the wheel’s path. All right, go ahead, submit the defect report for failed metaphor. That’s not working.

But you get the idea, or at least you get my repetition of the theme. Hey, repetition…. QA is the rumble strip of software development…. Someone stop me before I metaph again.

When can you say that phrase unironically? ABC News’s blog reports on the heir to Stuxnet, Duqu:

Duqu is designed to record key strokes and gather other system information at companies in the industrial control system field and then send that information back to whomever planted the bug, Symantec said.

Look at the Symantec posting to which ABC News refers. Find the word ‘bug’ in it? Me, either. Because Symantec knows computer terminology.

QAHY grants you permission to say say “It’s not a bug; it’s a feature” only when refering to someone reporting on technology thinks bug is a synonym for Trojan horse.

You know what job interview question I hate to get and don’t like to ask? The commonplace general “Why do you want this position / do you want to work here?” question. I admit, I’ve fumbled on it a bit when asked. Sure, you’ve done some research on the company, you have a sense about what they do, and maybe you have talked to someone working there and get some inside information. Maybe not. Regardless, they’re asking me what I would think about the company from the inside while I’m on the outside.

I mean, regardless of the company, I want the following things when I take a job:

• I want money. I’m not in this to change the world. I am a mercenary with a good skill set. I want a good paycheck. Also, they tell me benefits are important. But if you’re not going to offer me good compensation, I’m not going to work there.
   
  
• I want a multiplier. Frankly, I’d like some benefit to my working there for some length of time related to the fact that I’m working there for some length of time. I want options, I want an employee stock purchase program where I get the stock of a growing company at a discount, and/or I want room for some advancement.
   
  
• I want to do different things. I don’t want to sit in a cubicle, running the same set of test cases against a set of features or application for months, much less years.
   
  
• I want to make a difference. I don’t want to just be a tip o’ the hat to the importance of QA and testing whose suggestions and defects are ignored. I need to see that I’m improving the product or project.
   
  
• I need to be proud of where I work and what we do. This follows from many of the above, but I take pride in what I do, and if I can’t take pride in what we do, I won’t do it for long.
   
  
• I wouldn’t mind a foosball table. I’ve worked on this pull shot for years; I’d hate for it to go to waste.
   
  

That’s what I want from any job, and here’s a dirty little secret: Outside of the assembly line, every employer will tell you that’s what it offers. I guess the answer gives the interviewer a sense of your priorities or something. Or maybe it’s one of the basic things the HR schools say you must ask, or the interviewers just remember getting asked that question at every job interview they’ve ever been to. When interviewing, I don’t ask it. Meaningless, I tell you.

On the other hand, a bit of a riposte is to ask your interviewer or interviewers, “How long have you been here? Why are you here?” Someone working at the company knows what it’s like to work there and what the company offers its employees, or at least the employees sitting in on your interview.