QA Hates You

Dice.com used to be a good source for IT job postings, but in the last couple of years, not so much. I don’t know if it’s been totally eclipsed by the Joel on Software/Stack Overflow jobs board, or if my current city employers aren’t as hip to it as the employers in my previous, larger city, are, but it’s basically a collection of the same rotating set of low-level jobs that have a lot of churn or some hard-to-fill positions whose postings rotate through the primary employer followed by a series of recruiters looking to fill those jobs for the primary employer and wet their beaks in the process.

Oh, and now a posting for a pet groomer trainee.

At this point, Dice is a couple marketing intern and vacation club sales representative postings short of being Monster.com.

Unleash the Archers, “Test Your Metal”

That’s North American football, not soccer. Why would you call that “football” when the sport has a name associated with it and not another sport? Because you like the confusion?

Where was I?

Oh, yes, it’s football season, which is why I see a job posting like Mobile QA Engineer, and I think, “I’m more of a pocket tester.”

Ask an American friend to explain it to you.

U.D.O., “I Give As Good As I Get”:

Remember, testers and quality assurance professionals: You should always give at least as good as you get. If not better than you get.

A local business in Springfield, Missouri, allows you to smash things. It’s called a Rage Room.

Although, honestly, it’s really not much different than what we do every day in software testing.

And the QA lab here already has everything I need, from an electric guitar for some ill-rendered heavy metal to a heavy bag to varied martial arts weapons. So I don’t have to leave the cave and see the sunshine this week either.

How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity.

The article provides steps to help curb your negativity, but why would we want that? Better to use the steps:

1. Have a clear purpose.
2. Start with something positive.
3. Be specific.
4. End on a positive.

to write better bug reports so long as by “positive,” you say, “I’m sure this is broken” and “I’m sure customers will flood the service desk with calls unless it’s fixed.”

I posted on Twitter the other day:

Mostly as an excuse to repost one of my recent favorite animated gifs:

So apparently, I’m looking for a new career, and some recruiter was quick to seize upon it:

Recruiters who perform ill-limited LinkedIn search to blast the results with job offers usually hit me for jobs I’m way overqualified and overpaid for. It’s rare that I get something completely out of the industry like this.

But who knows what I’ll get when I add voiceover work to my LinkedIn profile. Perhaps job offers to do voices for cartoons, which is not unlike what I do daily on conference calls.

I’ll let Lzzy Hale and Halestorm take this one:

“Uncomfortable”.

Hopefully this consulting company can find the Senior Hemissourlp Desk person it’s looking for.

Heaven knows, good hemissourlp desk people are hard to find.

As you probably know, I’m a big fan of Leo Morachiolli, a Norwegian scientist proving every week that metal makes everything better.

Here is his cover of Peter somebody’s song “Sledgehammer”:

“I want to be your sledgehammer” is right on my business card.

So what happens if I regard this test email sent out to the production mailing list?

I mean, the only content of the message is a Forward to a Friend button.

Which works.

So, is this a successful test or not?

To be honest, I’ve worked some places where only scapegoats are recognized.

Three Days Grace, “The Mountain”:

It’s been a while since I’ve made fun of advertisements in software magazines, but since SD Times is still sending me free copies of their buzzword-laden collection of advertisements amid laudatory stories about their advertisers, I might as well go on with the show.

Check this guy out:

I suspect the designer is trying to show a unit-testing ninja throwing a flying sidekick. But the feet are in the wrong position for it. With a sidekick, the kicking foot is horizontal with the toes forward, and the toes on the bottom foot should not be pointing straight down. The front kick features the foot vertical with the toes drawn back, and but there’s not a leaping variant where the non-kicking foot tucks up like that.

Maybe the fellow is just Russian dancing.

Also note that the product has mock right in the name. How could I not?

A purported eBay missive tells me that I’m more than a number to them:

I’m an alphanumeric variable to them.

You know, it could be a phishing scam. Or it could be an expensive start to a research project that looks no better than a sophisticated phishing scam due to a failed mail merge.

I’m engaging it the same way in either case.

According to LinkedIn, people found my profile using these search terms:

Tower Insurance + EIFFEL + Reality Television + Alternate

Because, really, that pretty much sums up my career.

Of all those things, the only thing I recognize is that I once wrote an article about the Eiffel tower which got published.

I have to wonder how far into the list of results the searcher had to go to find me.

For a few dollars more, I could bump myself further up in the results.

What, you expect me to turn down the Iron Maiden when I dial into the daily stand-up?

Think again.

Testament, “Centuries of Suffering”:

Yes, I just got the new Testament album, Brotherhood of the Snake. Which is what I’m planning to call the Testers’ Union when I get enough signatures.

:

What’s in a name? For Walmart, it will soon be a little less.

The company, which became the largest retailer in the world with a huge chain of stores, is changing its name to reflect its increasing emphasis on e-commerce.

As of Feb. 1, it will no longer be “Wal-Mart Stores” and will get rid of the hyphen and drop “stores” from its legal name.

Just kidding; please continue with the normal mishmash of capitalization when referring to corporations, especially our own clients.

Walmart has brought some confusion upon itself, with signage and logos that do not include the hyphen but the corporate name and formal documents probably did.

Ideally, internal communications would use the proper branding so that the habits built into the copy writers, designers, and other communicators would automatically use it whenever they do their jobs, but too often the shorthand name for a company works its way into the copy or iconography. Which just looks sloppy.

Nothing explains the purple Comic Sans, though. Why does the CEO do that in his emails?

I might have mentioned it before, but I would not mind testing Amazon’s new cashier-less stores (Amazon’s Cashierless Store Is Almost Ready for Prime Time):

Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a person familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and charging their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow polyester.

I mean, the Pikachu suit is an integral part of any well-designed test plan.

But I am not running those test cases today.

In the case of Amazon Go, though, the Pikachu suits are a showy bit of theatre, but the real tests would involve more elaborate and time-tested mechanisms for criminal shrinkage like false-bottomed boxes and whatnot. Also, you’d definitely want to try out false positives, where teams would pass the items around and see who gets charged or who gets wrongly charged.