QA Hates You

Kenny Loggins, “Danger Zone”

You know that’s what I listen to when I set the load testing tool to ramming speed.

Ozzy Osbourne, “The Road to Nowhere”

Which is from one of Ozzy Osbourne’s comeback albums, almost twenty-five years ago, old man.

The 5 Most Disastrous Typos In Human History

Fortunately, the interconnected world of Internet of Things and the electronificiation and softwarization of everything will make this list look quite different in ten years, I expect.

Apparently, Amazon is having trouble with its Go store:

Amazon Go is a no go so far.

Amazon postponed the grand opening of its Amazon Go store due to technical difficulties.

Scheduled to debut in early 2017, the small convenience store concept eliminates checkout lines by allowing shoppers with an Amazon Go app to grab what they want from the store and walk out.

The Wall Street Journal says Amazon is having trouble tracking more than 20 customers at a time and keeping tabs on merchandise moved from store shelves.

The store is currently only open to Amazon workers who have been shopping as beta testers before the general public can give it a shot.

Man, I would love to get involved in a project like that. If testing computer stuff is like a tabletop role-playing game, testing that sort of thing would be like a full-scale mock battle at a Society for Creative Anachronism meet-up.

Think of all the crazy things you’d have to try. Juggling the produce before putting it in your cart. Passing the same item among multiple people. Putting the things back in the wrong place and having someone pick them up. And the shoplifting.

Here is a couple things you’d have to consider.

Over at the Microsoft Edge blog, Nolan Lawson has an in-depth look of the simple scroll:

Scrolling is one of the oldest interactions on the web. Long before we had pull-to-refresh or infinite-loading lists, the humble scrollbar solved the web’s original scaling problem: how can we interact with content that’s stretched beyond the available viewport?

Today, scrolling is still the most fundamental interaction on the web, and perhaps the most misunderstood. For instance, do you know the difference between the following scenarios?

• User scrolls with two fingers on a touch pad
• User scrolls with one finger on a touch screen
• User scrolls with a mouse wheel on a physical mouse
• User clicks the sidebar and drags it up and down
• User presses up, down, PageUp, PageDown, or spacebar keys on a keyboard

As you might recall, I onct wrote a song about it: “There Must Be Fifty Ways To Scroll Your Window“.

The piece on the Edge blog goes into greater detail that your developers might find interesting.

Use the serial/Oxford comma because the Maine courts say you should:

If you have ever doubted the importance of the humble Oxford comma, let this supremely persnickety Maine labor dispute set you straight.

. . . .

This is what the law says about activities that do NOT merit overtime pay. Pay attention to the first sentence:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

Of course, the Oxford comma gets all the credit, but note the parallel construction also makes it clear which verbs apply: Canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing are gerunds. Shipment and distribution are not. If they were to be included as equivalent, they would be shipping and distributing.

So take the advice of your humble Director: Use the serial comma and parallel construction–verbs ending in -ing, infinitives, gerunds (which are verbs ending in -ing that act as nouns as in the above example), and so on–to clearly express items that are the same in the purpose of the sentence.

Writing and to express oneself clearly are incorrect and confusing.

In my back pocket, where normal people carry pictures of their families, I have a list of common things I test every time I encounter a new application. It includes old favorites like the Hamlet test and new favorites like assorted comment strings, but nestled amongst the almost indistinguishable lines of random text, I have a set of SQL keywords:

SELECT FROM WHERE GROUP BY HAVING ORDER BY INSERT UPDATE WHERE MERGE DELETE BEGIN WORK START TRANSACTION COMMIT ROLLBACK CREATE DROP TRUNCATE ALTER

I added this back when I was doing a lot of testing for a company that used an offshore development team for much of its development work, and the offshore team was prone to making the same coding mistakes from project to project. I discovered at one point that they were preventing SQL injection attacks by barring users from entering SQL keywords in edit boxes. So I added the line to the list of tests lo, those many years ago, and I’ve included it in my basic test checklist ever since.

It’s taken me thirty seconds or a minute to run the test every time I’ve encountered a new form in many, many different projects for many, many different clients.

But I found another issue that the string triggered in a recent project, which validated my running the test perpetually, kind of like keeping every little gimcrack and doodad I’ve ever encountered in my closet or garage is validated whenever I need something like it and I don’t have to run to the hardware store to spend a buck to buy a new one.

So what’s the craziest test you always run, and why do you run it?

Skillet, “Feel Invincible”:

It’s Monday, though. The feeling will pass.

Cage the Elephant, “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked”:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve some grifting to do.

Meet the Man Who Claimed to Have the World’s Longest Last Name.

His name was Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfe­schlegel­stein­hausen­berger­dorff­welche­vor­altern­waren­gewissen­haft­schafers­wessen­schafe­waren­wohl­gepflege­und­sorg­faltig­keit­be­schutzen­vor­an­greifen­durch­ihr­raub­gierig­feinde­welche­vor­altern­zwolf­hundert­tausend­jah­res­voran­die­er­scheinen­von­der­erste­erde­mensch­der­raum­schiff­genacht­mit­tung­stein­und­sieben­iridium­elek­trisch­motors­ge­brauch­licht­als­sein­ur­sprung­von­kraft­ge­start­sein­lange­fahrt­hin­zwischen­stern­artig­raum­auf­der­suchen­nach­bar­schaft­der­stern­welche­ge­habt­be­wohn­bar­planeten­kreise­drehen­sich­und­wo­hin­der­neue­rasse­von­ver­stand­ig­mensch­lich­keit­konnte­fort­pflanzen­und­sicher­freuen­an­lebens­lang­lich­freude­und­ru­he­mit­nicht­ein­furcht­vor­an­greifen­vor­anderer­intelligent­ge­schopfs­von­hin­zwischen­stern­art­ig­raum, Senior.

Which is shorter than many names in my address book of test data.

Bonus good points for the long unbroken last name which is good for testing wrapping and truncation.

It’s time for annual reviews. How do you think you did in 2016?

Here’s mine: “Monster” by Skillet.

Yesterday was Rutger Hauer’s 73rd birthday, and we at QAHY wish him the very best and many more.

Why? Because we’re members of the Rutger Hauer school of software testing, remember.

Gemini Syndrome, “Remember We Die”:

This week, I’m starting all user stories the proper Existentialist way: “Remember, we die, but….”

Remember, we die, but during the course of his meaningless existence, the store clerk wants to scan or type the SKU to find out if other stores in the local area have the same item in different sizes in stock.

Amazon illustrates a test case I have been overlooking.

If you search for herb alpert i feel you, you get no results:

Click for full size

Which is really weird, because I’ve bought Herb Alpert’s I Feel You. And I just successfully found it. However, I previously searched for i feel you herb alpert:

Click for full size

It looks like in the first case, when the artist’s name came first, Amazon incorrectly “corrected” the name to herb albert before conducting the search and then returned me an erroneous result.

So now in my test cases for searches, I have to alter the order of the search terms to ensure they return the same results.

I’ve gotten a link to the Big List of Nasty Strings several times in the last couple of days, so it must be going around the social media again. I’ve already used it for a number of years as a second set of strings to test after my first line of strings (including Hamlet) if I have time.

But you know what the BLNS lacks? Code comment markers and other code keywords. Oh, yeah. I like to use these:

<!HTMLComment>

<?php php.script(start)


Try those bad Oscars out in your edit boxes. Keep in mind, they might well go into the database without a problem, but as with any other string test, half of the test (and quite often much of the fun) comes when your Web or other application is called upon to display these values again.

For example, WordPress itself cannot handle HTML comments and the end PHP script line above; when I first reviewed this post, the complete text of the post did not display and much of the blog itself did not display (as PHP after the end PHP line did not work).

Whenever I have to take a video call, I spend a couple minutes testing out the angle of the Web cam (and the sound quality of the microphone).

Not only does it ensure that your video call is professional-looking and impressive, but in my case, it can be the difference between frightening someone who doesn’t know me well and impressing them with my well read nature.

That is, I lower the Web cam to hide the bladed weapon collection and focus on the bookshelves below it.

I also remove the room’s second chair and make sure there are no comic book boxes, vacuum cleaners, or piles of rubbish within view.

But, to be honest, I’m still making a fictitious shot, though, because the books behind me are the books I have yet to read.

Adelitas Way, “Ready for War (Pray for Piece)”:

Well, it has Pray for Peace right in the title. That makes it a Christmas song to me.

Although taken from the medical world, this offers some good advice on how to become a process improvement style consultant.

Peter Townshend, prescient:

Did you know if you select multiple items in Mozilla Thunderbird and press Delete followed quickly by enter, Thunderbird deletes the messages and then opens multiple empty message windows?

You can often find unexpected behavior when you trigger two actions at once that the user would never do, such as this particular thing I always do.

In Web testing, you can do this using the Enter key to trigger one button while clicking another or by clicking multiple buttons in quick succession.

In mobile testing, you can do this by tapping two things at once or making two gestures at once. Or by Doing something and pressing the Home button or the Power button.

In desktop application testing, this can be by clicking a button while pressing a hot key or pressing multiple hot keys at once or in rapid succession.

Regardless, the application should always pause other input while taking an action and should always check to see if it has everything it needs to act on when starting an action. In this case, it would be an active, not deleted message.