Still, you should check on your own, but this would be a handy thing to pass to your designers just in case they are trainable.

Here’s a handy tool called File Destructor that creates invalid files with different extensions of determined size that you can use when running your corrupt file tests.

It’s designed to create files you can send to teachers to support a “the computer ate my homework” excuse, but we in QA can subvert that, can’t we? We can subvert anything.

Given how long the newer version I have (Paint Shop Pro Photo X2) takes to load, I often click its icon and then go back about my business so it can show its splash screen for 30 seconds while I work in an active application.

Step 2: When I click for More information, show me yet another screen that doesn’t tell me any information.

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Well, what can it hurt? By this time I’ve figured it’s probably PSP since I can sometimes get to this screen and sometimes I can get to PSP. So I start the download, hoping I’m not getting Weatherbug 2009.

But here’s the thing: in the middle of the download, I decided to lament to it to you guys, and I clicked Cancel to stop it so I could get those lovely screenshots for you. The Updater dispelled the progress bar window, but it left Paint Shop Pro in a modal form so I could not actually get to it. I had to kill it from the taskbar.

Eventuallly, though, after I mucked around with those things enough, I got to the installer, and it finally, finally identified the product:

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Corel should have branded each and every of the preceding screens, but for some reason did not. Poor form, Peter. Now, maybe some day they can un-screw-up a great product that they had to tart up and, more inanely, change keyboard shortcuts that had been part of the product for a freakin’ decade. Yeah, when I get wed to a product, I get wed to a product and its custom shortcuts.

The application is a little flow charting piece called RF Flow.  I recommend it for building handy flowcharts to graphically illustrate the processes that everyone in your organization ignores.  However, right after you first install or reinstall version 5 (four years old now), the recent file list includes empty numbers since you haven’t actually opened 9 files yet:

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It would be simple enough to not populate the menu with recent filenames where the recent filename==null.

However.

In a real development environment, the sequence of this would be:

1. QA logs the defect.
2. Project manager, who’s been happy path testing and whatnot, reviews defect and says he cannot recreate it.
3. QA explains that it only happens when the recent file list is empty.
4. Developer says it won’t be a problem once user has opened 9 files, so  it’s not worth fixing since there’s a workaround.
5. QA says, come on, it’s a single conditional.  We could fix it ourselves but we don’t fix problems.
6. Developer comes back from lunch at the Thai place and says, but how many people will see this problem?
7. QA responds, “How many customers will we have?”
8. Developer recommends that on first launch, application should open 9 sample files maybe.  He’ll wait for someone in the Training/Documentation department to create them.  As soon as the company creates a Training/Documentation department.
9. Quibbling continues until launch date approaches.  As this small thing is not a critical defect, it does not stop the launch.
10. Developer attends launch party; QA waits in its lair, plotting against or hexing the developer who spent several hours over several weeks dodging a far smaller amount of work.

From this crucible, Known Issues Lists emerge.

And hey, RF Flow is an easy tool for flowcharting and cheaper than Microsoft Vizio.

He then proceeds to provide a list of handy tools you developers and designers can use as you create sites that should work with the dominant Web browser, but often don’t because you’re too bound to Safari or Firefox (“It works on my machine!”)

Here at QAHY, we’ll still use our preferred tool to test Web sites for IE compatibility: freakin’ IE.

I have a particular look for that moment in meetings.  I lower my brow, raise an eyebrow, tighten my mouth, and squint just a little.  This look indicates that I’ve reevaluated my assessment, and I’m checking the incurable wing box on the papers for your commitment.

BrowserShots.org is a handy little tool that will take a single page from your Web site, submit it to a distributed set of computers so that it can access your Web page in a varied set of browsers and platforms, and display a set of images of what that page looks like in those browsers.  You know, it’s a handy tool for a designer who wants to see how CSS and templates display across browsers, but it’s not a complete set of browser compatability testing, no matter how much your project manager and other stakeholders wish it.

Here’s a handy bulleted list of some shortcomings of BrowserShots and what it cannot do that real QA, or at least the intern you can spare on it, can handle.

• Mouse over effects.  It just takes a screenshot, remember.  That means that any mouseover images won’t show as broken images (and brother, I see this often enough to want to mouse over every menu item on every page).  Additionally, it won’t tell you that your a:hover style is Times New Roman 34 point when viewed in Safari.  Although I’ve not seen that particular combination, I see plenty of instances where it throws off the layout.  The images of the browser don’t show you that, but mousing over a link in a Web browser will.
• Animation.  The screenshot takes a quick shot, so it won’t show any animation you’ve got going on.  You’ll get a single bit of it.
• Anything rendered through plugins.  You won’t get to see if that animation works or that MP3 plays.  Additionally, you won’t get to see how many plugins cause problems since you’ll just get the image.
• Pages requiring login.  You can see how the login form looks, but it doesn’t have a facility to show you pages requiring login.
• In-place content rotation.  That is, if the application is supposed to show multiple rotating things, such as touts or callouts, in a position on the page, you’re going to see the one that loads the first time the browser loads.
• Polls.  You’ll see the poll question, but not how the results display after the user votes.
• Refreshed information. If something changes after x amount of time, you only get the first screenshot, so you won’t see any changes on the page.
• Forms.  So many gotchas in browser compatibility come from how forms behave, but you only get to look at them, not test their validation.
• Showing layouts of hidden bits in forms.  If you’ve got a drop-down list, you won’t see how the items within the list are rendered (that is, whether the list is wide enough).  Also, you won’t see the alignment of the entry into text boxes (off center sometimes; try it).
• Showing any of those show/hide divs. Designers are so fond of these devices now.  They like to click links and show/hide content on the page, but you will never see how that looks because BrowserShots shows only the page’s appearance on page load.
• Whether tracking works.  You need to run through the site to make sure tracking works as expected.  BrowserShots shows the page.  Period.  Additionally, tracking links and redirects may work oddly in BrowserShots.
• Some screenshots taken before site renders if it’s a slow site.  If your site is full of slow-loading awesomeness, some of the screenshots that display on BrowserShots.org will show the site as its rendering, not its final look.  Granted, that indicates problems anyway, but your designers will look at it and tell you that the site would have rendered correctly given enough time, even when this might not be the case.I mean, let’s look at one of our favorite sites, StlToday.com, as it appears in BrowserShots:
                                     Click for full size.
  
  Seriously, what does that show you that’s useful?
• Page behavior with browser resizing.  Most of the screenshots come from full-size browser windows.  You have no insight into what happens when the user sees it in windowed mode.  Does the sidebar, set to an absolute right position in the CSS, overlay the content page when the window is less than 800 pixels wide?  Hey, who knows?
• Scrolling concerns.  You can tell in the screenshots if you’d need to scroll right to see the page or down, but it’s not as obvious–or annoying–as it would be if you had to do it in an actual browser.  If you did, you’d log an issue, but BrowserShots makes this easy to overlook.

You can work around some of these by running your site through BrowserShots.org over and over again and for each individual page, but come on, eventually that will be as time consuming as just running through the site in different browsers.  Less cool, maybe, and it feels like work instead of submitting your URL and reading Slashdot until the pictures show up.

You know, I’ve got nothing against BrowserShots and as I’ve indicated, I think it’s got its place.  However, it is not a complete browser compatability regimen, and if your organization insists on using it as such, well, you’re going to have some well-deserved problems.

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.

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.

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.