Who knew QA was good for your mind?
An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.
In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.
QA knew, that’s who.
Another story about how manufacturing quality guys have all the fun, this time at Shure, manufacturer of microphones:
If you’ve ever played in a band or done some home recording, chances are good you’ve come across a Shure mic. Their products range from entry-level throw-aways to wallet-goring audiophile tools.
And while the company’s products are sometimes short on sex-appeal, their ubiquity is testament to their consistent level of quality: Shure knows how to build sturdy microphones. Ironically, this is due in no small part to the company’s equally impressive ability to destroy their mics as well.
“You test until something breaks, then you fix it,” says Boris Libo, Shure’s Manager of Corporate Quality Engineering. “And you keep going until you can’t fix it anymore.”
The SM58, a standard for live vocals known for its rugged design, is one of many products that Shure employees decimate on a regular basis. A few mics from every batch are brutalized in Shure’s destructive testing facilities to ensure they perform up to par. There they are scorched, smashed, frozen, and bathed in synthetic sweat.
Meanwhile, if one of us software quality guys brings a chainsaw on site, suddenly the contract is cancelled and you’re escorted to your car. Um, so I hear.
Here’s an interesting test for interactive QAers: a color acuity test that identifies how well you can differentiate between very close colors (or how old your monitor is).
Good color acuity comes in handy if you’re doing interactive QA especially, since clients are going to be very particular that the colors are the right match for their expensively consultant-determined Pantone colors, and if some intern fat fingers the CSS files, hilarity will ensue.
As some of you know, I spent some time in the printing industry, so I attribute that to my achieving a pretty good score of 18. Red Lewis, the printing plant foreman, though, he would have scored a negative number because that man could smell the differences in colors, word.
In the advertisement featuring a tattoo on a woman’s back, the classic rock station model wears clothes.
Hey, I’m not against using sex to sell a product, but, come on. Software license management software? Really?
As a side note, I only know of one woman who actually had the logo of a piece of software our employer sold tattooed onto her shoulder. Of course, the employer got acquired and the product got spiked, so it’s essentially now a piece of collector swag you can’t sell on Ebay.
Yes, that is a Beach Head II reference. Never mind, I feel so old.
But thanks to Matt Heusser for identifying me as one of the top 29 testers to follow on Twitter.
I’d like to add “Read my blog!” But you, gentle reader, are already convinced of that wisdom.
Yeah, Journal Interactive, it doesn’t work:
It’s a small oversight including this design element on the home page where it does not have the proper values to populate a breadcrumb trail. However, it’s on the front page. Of an interactive agency trying to court business.
In my experience, interactive agency Web sites fall into one of two categories:
Good to see Journal Interactive has the common touch, anyway.
Oh, lordy, they’ve made their logo not a link to their login page, but to their client Extranet login, which features more elaborate functions in the breadcrumb trail:
Layer on the first mistake what I would call a basic design error (The logo should link to the home page, not a login screen), and you’re not doing it right again. No, wait, they’ve got a login screen with a logon button. I’ll stop counting now.
Our long distance dedication comes today from Justin, who writes from Minneapolis, Minnesota:
i’m waiting for the snarky piece on target.com being incommunicado for so long
Well, Justin, here is your snark. The Target Web site was indeed up and down a lot on Tuesday morning, with the following message displaying and looking awful when viewed in IE:
I especially love the message from the guys in the computer room at the bottom: We’re up and running here. Bully for you.
But the lesson for the rest of us, as demonstrated by Target.com: Check browser compatibility of your error and maintenance messages. I doubt that page is Section 508 compliant.
Trust them to be computer savvy? Your first mistake.
This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don’t use it at all.
“90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands,” Russell said. “I do these field studies and I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve sat in somebody’s house as they’ve read through a long document trying to find the result they’re looking for. At the end I’ll say to them, ‘Let me show one little trick here,’ and very often people will say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my life!’”
Most computer users are not computer professionals, and many of them don’t spend 10 hours a day at the keyboard. Remember!
It may not pay to be nice in the workplace.
A new study finds that agreeable workers earn significantly lower incomes than less agreeable ones. The gap is especially wide for men.
The researchers examined “agreeableness” using self-reported survey data and found that men who measured below average on agreeableness earned about 18% more—or $9,772 more annually in their sample—than nicer guys. Ruder women, meanwhile, earned about 5% or $1,828 more than their agreeable counterparts.
Wouldn’t this then predict that QA should be by far the best compensated sector of the IT industry? Well, it would, but come on: We all know too many QA people who are too nice and let the developers get away with anything. They’re dragging our average down.
(Link seen here.)
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Text story here.
Come on: we’re all submitting budgets for next year with a line item for trained elephant, aren’t we?
Don’t have enough money in the budget for adequate QA, including penetration testing? How much do you have in your total bank account, then? Hackers Shift Attacks to Small Firms:
Recent hacking attacks on Sony Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp. grabbed headlines. What happened at City Newsstand Inc. last year did not.
Unbeknownst to owner Joe Angelastri, cyber thieves planted a software program on the cash registers at his two Chicago-area magazine shops that sent customer credit-card numbers to Russia. MasterCard Inc. demanded an investigation, at Mr. Angelastri’s expense, and the whole ordeal left him out about $22,000.
His experience highlights a growing threat to small businesses. Hackers are expanding their sights beyond multinationals to include any business that stores data in electronic form. Small companies, which are making the leap to computerized systems and digital records, have now become hackers’ main target.
“Who would want to break into us?” asked Mr. Angelastri, who says the breach cut his annual profit in half. “We’re not running a bank.”
With limited budgets and few or no technical experts on staff, small businesses generally have weak security.
The story lists a number of people and businesses who have run into serious financial difficulty or ruin after someone attacked their small businesses.
Unfortunately, in a lot of these cases, the small businesses are buying off-the-shelf solutions from vendors who themselves are small businesses that do not budget QA into their software development, which adds a layer of abstraction to the problem since the people who are ultimately on the hook don’t know the questions to ask and the people who do know don’t suffer directly from cutting out the QA man and passing those savings onto you.
If you plan to buy some software from a small vendor, it would behoove you to ask about their quality assurance and testing practices. Especially if you’re hooking that software up to your bank account.
Also, it might not be a bad idea to hire some technical support help or have the guy at your local computer shop stop by and secure your PCs, too.
Let’s all play Abraham Ward:
During WWII, Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald undertook a study with the British Air Ministry to use statistical analysis to help protect bombers flying over enemy territory. The data to be crunched included the number and location of bullet holes on returning aircraft, and the goal was to use this information to determine where to best add armor to the plane’s structure.
A nifty little chart was created to show where the maximum number of bullet holes were located on returning aircraft. This chart showed the greatest damage not on the main wing and tail spars, engines, and core fuselage areas, but rather on the aircraft extremities. Based on this, the Air Ministry suggested adding armor to those extremities. Wald suggested they were dead wrong.
Wald said more armor should go on the places that had the least holes. Huh? What was he thinking?
Wald was keeping the Air Ministry from falling into the “survivorship bias”: they were forgetting the their data did not include the planes that had been lost. If the returning planes had no holes in their wing spars and engines, the better assumption to make is that even a few holes in those places were deadly: no damage was recorded in those areas because those planes were the ones that had crashed. Wald recommended more armor in those data-free areas.
That’s a good lesson for testing and quality assurance. Apply them thusly:
(Note this story did appear on SQA Forums, but I saw it elsewhere since I don’t loiter over there much these days.)
Well, now that I can find it, I can comment on this Information Week article, “Omnipotent Hacker Myth Lets Business Off The Hook“, which says:
If you don’t know much about computer security, you might come away from the past few months with the idea that criminal hackers are gods. Breathless news coverage has portrayed LulzSec and its ilk as capable of striking down mighty (though mortal) targets at whim, including law enforcement, three-letter government agencies, and major corporations. And if the hackers are omnipotent, companies can take even less responsibility for protecting customer information than they already do. After all, how are mere mortals expected to defend themselves against thunderbolts hurled by Zeus?
In the past, one compelling argument for vigorous information security was to protect a business’ reputation. The reasoning: Companies that fail to safeguard customer data will suffer brand damage and lose customer trust, leading to lost sales and profits. While such losses have always been difficult to quantify, executives could understand at a gut level that exposing thousands of customer records to criminals makes the company look incompetent or even negligent.
But this argument is showing cracks. First, there’s not a lot of evidence that a security breach has a lasting effect on a brand.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you could make the same argument about software quality: that software companies, especially the small or mid-sized companies, don’t do software testing or adequate testing because their peers don’t do enough, so users and customers are growing inured to the bugs, timeouts, and failures.
The key difference, though, is that when this article talks about brands, it talks about TJ Maxx, DSW Shoes, OfficeMax, and so on. That is, customers build loyalty to something else about the company aside from the software: store locations, appreciation for its lines of product, convenience, price, and so on.
For technology companies, the software is the brand. The customer/user does not have any loyalty to your company aside from what your software does. And if what your software does is break, your users will break–to the next piece of software that might suit their needs and does not have the record in their minds of failure.
Case in point: Are you finding your Facebook streams starting to thin as your acquaintances move to Google+? QED.
Or, as Joe Flood reiterates, “The Software Is Wrong, Not The People“:
The media library in WordPress was discussed. Mullenweg admitted that it is confusing and gets difficult to manage once you have lots of images in the library. A man in the audience brought up a technical issue he had with the library. Mullenweg explained that you could actually do what the man wanted to in WordPress but stated:
The software is wrong, not the people.
This is a revolutionary statement. Mullenweg could have just told the man that “you’re doing it wrong” before telling him the “right” way to work with WordPress. Instead, the fact that users had problems with the media library told him that the software needed to be improved.
I’ve seen too many defects called “training issues,” wherein a non-existent trainer was projected to teach users the convoluted workarounds necessary to avoid bug-infested dark corners of the application. But the motto above, the software is wrong, not the people, nails it, too.
If professionals in the field are having trouble with your software, it’s not those professionals who need to change. It’s the “professionals” in the software industry–and often rank amateurs in the real-world field for which their software is intended–who need to improve.
A slide in a Forbes slideshow discusses a disappearing job:
Proofreaders and Copy Markers
Five-year decline: 31%
Why it’s declining: This middle-class job requiring a four-year college degree and offering flexibility and an average salary of about $30,000 is on the chopping block. It contracted by over 6,000 positions in five years and is expected to continue shrinking through 2018 due to technology advances and shrinking media organizations.
Contemporary culture is becoming more accustomed to grammatical and spelling errors, intentional and not, in what used to be formal communication. So companies can jettison their quality assurance professionals in this area.
Now, think about how prevalent errors you encounter in the wild are becoming, and wonder if software quality assurance will follow the same pattern in five or ten years as companies determine users accept more annoyance and failure on the part of their applications and Web sites.
Goodness gracious, I’m beginning to sound like the drunken wife of an ASQ official, lamenting late in a party that all our jobs are going to Asia. Except my fear is greater than that: the jobs might just go away.
In going with yesterday’s theme, ICANN renders any bit of code you have that validates uniform resource locators or email addresses obsolete:
The number of top-level internet domains is set to double over the next few years, after ICANN today approved the launch of a program that will let any company apply to run dot-anything.
…
Many large companies are expected to apply for so-called “.brand” extensions – Canon and Hitachi have announced plans for .canon and .hitachi, for example.
Others will apply for potentially mass-market terms such as .music, .web, blog, .porn and .sport. Some, such as .bank, will likely be restricted to very narrow groups of registrants.
…
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the program will enable the creation of domain extensions in non-Latin character sets, such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek and Cyrillic.
Yeah, your applications that check to make sure that the domains are fewer than 4 characters? All will be defective when this goes into effect.
(Link via CGH.)
Tucked into this sad story about a boomtown going bust, we have this little nugget:
On June 20, that tongue-in-cheek greeting will become a fact. Empire, Nev., will transform into a ghost town. An eight-foot chain-link fence crowned with barbed wire will seal off the 136-acre plot. Even the local ZIP Code, 89405, will be discontinued. [Emphasis added.]
I know all of your applications validate United States postal ZIP codes, right? Ha! I’m just kidding. We’re lucky if our applications actually limit users to five numbers or five plus four numbers.
However, in the real world, sometimes valid values go away. Particularly if they’re maintained by a government or governing organization that handles industry standards. And woe be to you, wayfarer, if your application deals with both. In that case, sometimes the government will give you one value (or take away one value) where the industry organization gives you another (or takes it away or does not take it away when the government does).
So what’s your plan for that? Don’t think only in terms of how your application will react (badly), but also how your organization will deal with them procedurally. Or when the clients or users start calling to raise holy Dis.
Apparently, one flavor of Chrome OS ships with an Easter egg:
Brad Wells found the Easter egg. Aided by a little Google searching, he found out how to activate a fake blue screen of death–one of the “legacy” leftovers from the PC era Google hopes to banish with its browser-based operating system.
Which leads me to my official QAHY pronouncement on Easter eggs: professionally, I am against them and argue against them any time I can.
Why? It’s a nugget of code thrown in that does not apply to the function of the application. Sure, it’s a spot of fun, but it’s extraneous code, and extraneous code has the chance of being buggy and whatnot that all other code has along with a) the possibility it won’t be tested if someone is sneaking it in and b) the possibility that it won’t be kept up-to-date or retested in later versions.
Also, I am against any developer having any spot of fun at any time for any reason (unless they appear in my novel, available now!).
In the software development world, we like to think we can artificially constrain environments to a limited subset of real-world situations so as to limit our time required for testing. We don’t want to test in IE 6 because our organizations’ designers no longer think it’s cool and whatnot.
Fortunately medical device makers and government arbiters are not so constrained:
In a large chamber at the Food and Drug Administration labs here, scientists are bombarding medical devices such as pacemakers and hearing aids with electromagnetic waves. Their goal: to see how safely the critical medical devices can interact with the growing volume of waves people encounter daily from increased use of electronic gadgets like microwaves, airport scanners and cellphones.
The so-called anechoic chamber, which measures nearly 36-feet long, is made of special material that absorbs electromagnetic waves. It’s considered to be the purest way to measure interactions between medical devices and electronic gadgets because there are no echoes or reflections of electromagnetic waves from the chamber’s walls or ceiling to affect the calibrations.
The research effort, led by the FDA, has resolved such mysteries as why a type of electronic wheelchair tended to start itself and drive out of control, and why some people with spinal-cord stimulators, implanted to help control chronic pain, collapsed after passing through a metal detector. Still unresolved, the scientists say, is how to stop the screeching noise that hearing-aid wearers experience when they try to use a cellphone. Researchers also are trying to understand how a new technology widely used to track inventory in retail stores might cause problems for people with pacemakers.
I often say I’d like to test for Underwriters Laboratories so I could fire Howitzers at things, but it sounds like the FDA has an environments lab to envy.
So what’s my point? Your organization might think it has a grasp on what your users are going to do and into what environments your clients will (or MUST according to you) install your applications, but remember all your legalese terms-of-use hand-waving matters only so much in the real world.
Anecdotal research seems to indicate just that:
A South Australian charter boat operator has made a fascinating discovery whilst conducting research into what kinds of music affect the behaviour of Great White Sharks.
Every sensible swimmer knows that avoiding a school of bait fish or immediately leaving the water if a cut started to bleed is ‘best practice’ when attempting to avoid a meeting with a shark.
But Eyre Peninsula’s Matt Waller has added another tip to the ‘don’t get eaten’ handbook with his discovery that Great White’s are much less aggressive when listening to ACDC – particularly ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.
I don’t know if I’ll like it so much when we have to crank up Enya in the lab to improve productivity.
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