QA Hates You

The author of this piece doesn’t get it:

By focusing solely on social media’s features, Owyang continues to perpetuate the pervasive illusion that, if we choose the right tools, our customers will converse with us, talk about us, and share our content.

You know. The “hyperbole, artifical branding, and pro-corporate content” most of our websites still feature.

The relevancy of our corporate websites is not dependent whatsoever on which social media widgets have been deployed throughout the site. Its relevancy is driven by our site content, no matter who is creating it. And that content requires as much, if not more, strategic planning and consistent oversight as do our social media initiatives.

The goal of any site development is not to provide quality, usable, and relevant content for users on behalf of the client. The goal of any contract work is to separate the client from its budget, as much as possible and as easily as possible. And grafting in a Twitter feed dependent upon a site that fails daily? Easy and expensive.

(Link seen on the Twitterverse.)

It’s afternoon. Surely, you still have a fresh pot of coffee in the company’s kitchen.

Just remember: Coffee improves your throttling grip.

A quick reminder courtesy of Conan the Barbarian about job satisfaction in QA:

Sorry, guys, despite our best efforts, they’re going to launch the product with a handful (King Kong’s hand, natch) of critical issues that only QA (and those who deviate from the happy path) would find.

Here’s a button to press for final launch.

And may God or your preferred deity have mercy upon your souls.

Joe Strazzere reviews a job listing for a QA position at Fog Creek Software and finds its job expectations a little odd:

Joel seems to believe that one part of a tester’s role is to boost the morale of developers. He says “Believe it or not, one of the most valuable features of a tester is providing positive reinforcement.” I have to say that I’ve never heard that expressed before, and I can’t say that I agree. While I do want my testers to be professional, and enthusiastic about the company and their job, I really don’t want my testers concerned with programmer morale. What if programmer morale starts to dip? Should we blame the testers?

Anyone who has read Joel on Software for any length of time knows that Mr. Spolsky and Fog Creek Software are very developer-centric. Spolsky does not hide that he thinks the best and the brightest developers work for him, the rock stars, the Olympians. You need to watch out for those guys. Not Spolsky and Fog Creek Software, et al, specifically. But the Rock Star Developers and environments that cater to them.

Rock Star Developers think that software only exists as a proving ground to showcase their genius! It’s not about solving users’ problems or streamlining operations that take place in the physical world. It’s fourth dimensional chess, man, except the fourth dimension isn’t time, you silly mortal; Rock Stars are not beholden to time and to deadlines. Only to the elegance of their solutions. That’s the fourth dimension. Elegance as defined by Rock Star Developers.

You’ll notice that, at Fog Creek Software, the software tester is only there to improve morale and not to provide massages. That’s because Rock Star Developers know that the other people in software companies lack any sort of valuable skills; if software testers could provide good massages, they would not waste their time as software testers; they would be masseurs or masseuses.

I’ve worked at some Rock Star Developer workplaces in the past. It’s not for everyone; if you’re going to go into that sort of environment, you really have to get your elbows up and throw them from time to time if you’re going to actually make the software better. Or, alternately, you could just not care.

So how can you determine if a company is a Developerpalooza before you give your two weeks’ notice at your current environment? Here are a couple signs to look for:

• It’s a small to medium sized company. A large company gets corporate enough that its bureaucratic professionals will stabilize things into being interchangeable with any other big company in any other industry.
• The leader of the company is a developer.
• Or, the leadership of the company is located elsewhere from the software development campus, and a developer runs the campus.
• The leader of the company talks/blogs about the developers as though they were more important than the other people in the company.

I’m not saying you should never work in those circumstances; you can get a lot of fiscal reward out of working for a small or medium sized company if they offer stock options or stock purchase plans. However, you’re less likely to get respect as a tester out of the gate. Get in there, throw some elbows, and maybe you’ll get some respect to go along with your salary.

(Full disclosure: I once responded to Joel Spolsky when he was looking for someone to write a new edition of his FogBugz book. I didn’t get the gig, so if you’d like, you can think I’m retaliating here instead of just spreading my usual misodevny.)

An interesting metric to use for your Web design and development estimation efforts: Time Breakdown Of Modern Web Design.

It’s not actually a printed medium until you print it, but the Software Testing Club Magazine is now available in PDF and features a classic QAHY post.

Thanks, guys, for including me.

Is it always i before e except after c?  This error message from GoDaddy tries a conservative approach:

Click for full size

Well, that particular developer left nothing to chance and put an e on either side of the i.

And nobody else looked at the error message.