QA Hates You

If you’re not compelling your developers to spell check their code, you’re falling down on the job.

ComponentOne is offering one that works with Microsoft Visual Studio. It runs through comments, HTML, and string constants.

Quote from the story of the product announcement:

Billy Hollis, an author and Microsoft “regional director”—one of a number of volunteers recognized by Microsoft’s Developer Platform evangelism group for technical expertise—suggested that developers should use a spell checker to improve the perceived quality of their work.

“The only way users can judge quality is [by] what they see,” Hollis explained. “If they see misspelled words, many will assume they are seeing shoddy work.” He believes that many developers depend on testers to find spelling problems that appear in the user interface and submit the spelling errors as bug reports.

Yes, indeed. And if you’re expecting QA to find all the words in all of the messages, you’re expecting more out of QA than I do.

Oracle is picking up Empirix’s e-Test Suite.

The product can only get better. Of course, if anyone had picked it up, it could only get better. As you might know, gentle reader, I remain singularly unimpressed with the product.

Joe Strazzere points to a tool that looks handy: BareTail.

Some of my happiest years in testing occurred as I sat in a dark computer lab, watching a bank of monitors run automated scripts while a main monitor (19″! At the time, it was worth an exclamation point!) used the command tail to display a scrolling list of the latest entry to the test logs.

Were those happy, halcyon days because I got to work in a darkened computer lab? Because I was young and still optimistic? Or because I had the wonderful tail command?

It’s hard to say, but I did move on to other things and DOS/Windows environments without access to the joy of the command line tail, and I did become a bitter, cynical, distrusting quality assurance professional you readers all know and, well, read.

However, BareTail looks to provide the same functionality as tail with some additional Windows bells and whistles. Whereas I’ve sometimes thought of writing my own utility to do this, it looks as though I’m spared that effort. I’ve downloaded my copy and cannot wait to try it out.

Cue the renascence music, and watch for a smile on my face. Professionally, I haven’t had one for years (save for dark mirth and gallows humor), but it might happen. Might.

As you expect, gentle reader, even when it comes to checking the links on Web sites, I prefer manual testing, particularly at the onset of a Web site development project. That is, I do want to personally, with my own index finger, click every single link on every single page, including that repeated navigational menu bar that would never, ever change across the pages (the developers and designers say) and don’t tend to change except when they catastrophically fail, for no discernable reason, on a single page.

That’s not to say that automated link checking doesn’t have its place, because it does. The remainder of this piece talks about its place.

However.

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Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software explains some of the thinking behind Evidence-Based Scheduling included in the new release of FogBugz.

Over the last year or so at Fog Creek we’ve been developing a system that’s so easy even our grouchiest developers are willing to go along with it. And as far as we can tell, it produces extremely reliable schedules. It’s called Evidence-Based Scheduling, or EBS. You gather evidence, mostly from historical timesheet data, that you feed back into your schedules. What you get is not just one ship date: you get a confidence distribution curve, showing the probability that you will ship on any given date.

Honestly, that’s what you ought to be doing if you’re taking a scientific approach. However, your organization and its schedule builders aren’t scientific, preferring instead to build timelines and effort estimates to fit external constraints, deadlines, or budgets instead of reality.

So, carry on with those unwritten tasks of covering your rump when failures occur.

Throughout much of the IT world, the developers and the people who love them want technology to solve everything for them, to be everything to them. Unfortunately, we in QA spend most of our days steeped in the myriad ways technology fails without remorse on its part and often without remorse on the part of the negligent nabobs who created it.

So you can understand why I’m not an early adopter to the latest gee-whizzery that uses faulty algorithms to supplant fallible people. So when I saw several ads for WhiteSmoke, a product that’s supposed to review and improve your written work, you might think I would be tempted to go to its Web site and review it for grammar. Brother, you know me too well.

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Well, it’s not really Microsoft Warstrike, it’s Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool (WAST, which as you old Bard’s Tale fans know was the keystroke combination for the Warstrike conjuror’s spell, good for 4-16 points of damage on a group and a pretty potent weapon). Now, Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool lies buried in the Microsoft Downloads section (here). Screenshot:

Click for full size

It’s an old download (ca. 2002), but it looks to work with IE 7. So if you’re looking for a free rudimentary load-style tester, here’s something.

The following is not a compensated post; I’m merely extolling the virtues of a piece of software I found useful.

As I’ve mentioned, falsifying taking screenshots is a good means to capture details for defect reports. Your basic Windows install comes with Microsoft Paint, which is a mechanism you can use to save and manipulate your images, but it’s very clunky, with rudimentary tools and only the ability to have one file open at once.

Some people use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint for their picture editing ability and save their screenshots as documents or slide presentations, but some of our outsourced friends might not have Microsoft Office on their workstations. Remember, you want to save those screenshots as an image format so the developers can ignore the obvious that’s presented by an image editor or a simple Web browser.

I’ve used Paint Shop Pro since version 7 (which I still have installed on my main workstation, since there’s nothing I’ve needed since 2001. Jasc and then Corel have come out with newer versions every couple of years, and they’re still priced under $70 a seat (unlike other, more expensive graphics editors). Like UltraEdit, I’ve spread it across several of my employers.

Paint Shop Pro has a pretty good set of tools for circling or highlighting issues on screenshots, for adding text for emphasis, and for altering Web 2.0 user submissions to give cute little doggies red demon eyes to match your QA soul. You can do all of these at once because you can have more than one file open at a time.

So if you haven’t considered a graphics editor, consider this one. It costs under a hundred, so you’re not exactly breaking the budget on it, either.

The Mozilla Foundation plans to give away its own security tools, including a fuzzer:

Mozilla Corp. will release some of its homegrown security tools to the open-source community, the company’s head of security said Wednesday, starting with a “fuzzer” it uses to pin down JavaScript bugs in Firefox.

The JavaScript fuzzer, said Window Snyder, Mozilla’s security chief since last September, will be handed over tomorrow morning, following a presentation at Black Hat, the two-day security conference that opened today in Las Vegas.

“We’re announcing that we’ll be sharing our tools with the community,” said Snyder, “and releasing the JavaScript fuzzer then.” Other tools, she said, would follow, including fuzzers that stress-test the HTTP and FTP protocols. Those two, however, are not ready to offer up to outsiders, largely because Mozilla wants to wrap up talks with other browser vendors before they do.

So if you haven’t been fuzzing your applications, you’re running out of excuses.

The following is not a compensated post; I’m merely extolling the virtues of a piece of software I found useful.

I have been a fan of UltraEdit probably for about a decade; I cannot actually remember the last time I had a PC onto which I did not install this robust little text editor.

Notepad and Wordpad come free with Windows and most workstations in offices come with Microsoft Word these days, so you might not see the value in adding another program to your desktop. However, UltraEdit adds a number of features not currently available in these other applications, including:

• Syntax highlighting, which shows keywords in a number of languages in another color to make the files more easily readable. The list of languages and the keywords themselves are extensible, so you can make your own as needed (I once made keyword files for MOL and SDF chemical data files).
• Tabbed view, which means I can have a bunch of files or empty files open and can work on them at once, seeing their contents at a glance. Neither Notepad or Wordpad offer the multiple files thing, and Microsoft Word allows multiple files, but not a tabbed view.
• Find or search/replace in files, which lets you dig through all the files in a folder to find what you need.

At only $50 a throw, I install it on every PC I own, as I mentioned, and I’ve also introduced it to every workplace where I’ve been in the last decade. Friends, let me tell you that this includes a rather surreal experience I had with my last Corporate employer.
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