QA Hates You

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.

Good morning, project managers! Here’s a couple songs to perk you up for a change!

We in QA are certain things are going to go right for you this week. Unlike all the rest of them.

Hey, I finally upgraded Wordpress here, so let me know if you run into any weirdness.  It looks as though the migration lost all user accounts, so you’ll have to register again to comment.  Also, I’ll have to rebuild the blogroll since that, too, is lost.

However, now it will handle YouTube videos correctly, so we’ll get back to the weekly QA anthems.

Thank you, that is all.

That’s obsessive-compulsive disorder with the letters in alphabetical order.

Cartoon Tester shows how you can spot a tester in a supermarket.

When he was drawing me, I would have preferred that Mr. Glover had gotten my good side, but you take what you get.  Because he certainly captures my essence, and probably many of yours.  When I get a kiosk or console of any sort, I reflexively try some boundary analysis and exploratory testing, even before I use the kiosk for whatever I need to use it for.

Here’s an e-mail that might give hope to Web designers and developers in the world, probably written by a Web designer to boot:

Click for full size

I suspect a Web designer wrote that subject line because he or she left in an extraneous “this” and misspelled, “Yay!”

I can understand the glee.  Hopefully with Gmail dropping IE6 support, they can, too!  If they even think about anything but Safari or Chrome.

However, as a reminder, IE 6 has a 20% share of the browser market in this January of the year of Our Lord 2010 according to Net Market Share.  More than Firefox.  5 times that of Chrome.

If your site or application doesn’t handle it, you’re going to strand a lot of users.

Sometimes your organization needs to tie into third party Web sites with corporate badging.  In these cases, you either provide them with a set of CSS files and whatnot that cover your site’s template.  In other cases, you just trust them to grab the things they need off the Web site.  And you let them grab.

However, it would behoove you to apply a little intelligence to the process instead of doing the equivalent of cut and paste.  Case in point: Amazon.com, which links to off-site press releases but does not pass logged-in state, leading to a misleading bit of imagery:

First, here is Amazon.com when you’re not logged in:

Click for full size

Now, when you’re logged in, the top identifies that you’re logged in.  All over the place:

Click for full size

But if you click through to the media releases, you’re taken from Amazon.com to the site of some PR or PR hosting firm:

Click for full size

Amazon is not sharing credentials with this site, which is appropriate; however, note that at the top, the site indicates that the user is not logged into Amazon.com when this is not the case.  Showing incorrect things is bad.  Sometimes, I have to restate this in defense of defects.  Telling the user things which are not so is bad.

Corporate IR.net should have masked this messaging.  All other links and whatnot would have worked seamlessly, taking the user back to Amazon where he or she is logged in.  But the invitation to log in or sign up should have been suppressed.  You don’t need to pass the credentials, and you don’t have to fake a logged-in look.

Remember when you’re working across sites like this to look with a jaundiced eye to the places where the original template shows state that the copied site should not.

When I go all medieval Eastern European when I meet someone professionally and introduce myself as

Noggle the QAthian, the scourge of infuzia, the sorrow of Tripostan, the desecrator of MetaMatria, the castigation of Dearay, emperor of Jeracor….

should I use my Gozer voice or my Vigo voice?

Maybe we can draw a lesson from manufacturing quality processes to apply to SQA.  Here’s an article on How Lean Manufacturing Can Backfire:

But Toyota’s recent problems highlight how certain elements of this approach—eliminating overlap by using common parts and designs across multiple product lines, and reducing the number of suppliers to procure parts in greater scale—can backfire when quality-control issues arise.

What’s the software equivalent?  Open source components and reliance on third party integrations.

You know I bang on the drum of distrusting anything that your company doesn’t develop even more than you distrust anything that your company does develop.  However, you can now use the Toyota recall as a metaphor for how that can break and can pervasively impact your software.

Ever wonder what Web designers did before the Web existed?

This article gives us some insight.

In Springfield, Missouri, the Craigslist designers are ganging up on one local company.

1:

 
Click for full size

2:

Click for full size

3:

Click for full size

You know, I once worked at a dysfunctional company.  No, I mean crazy dysfunctional.  It was run by a guy named Bob who went from selling printing services in the 1970s and 1980s (like business cards and whatnot) to building PCs in the 1990s.  He was a scatterbrained, power-drunk mad professor with no technical skill or business acumen.  His wife and a couple of employees loyal to his wife, who also worked there, kept the business afloat.  Bob would rant and rave at employees, he would fire people at the drop of the hat (one woman brought in doughnuts every time she was fired).  And I caught on in 1994 as a Clerk Friday, which meant I did some shipping/receiving, some filing, some accounts receivable (violating many Federal statutes given my training–”Here’s a printout of late customers.  Here’s a phone”).  The fellow and I once had an argument about my name, as he addressed me as Mark repeatedly and was confused when I corrected him.  Then he fired me, and I didn’t come in to work for the celebratory doughnuts (since the woman was fired the same day), and he called me at home to ask where I was.  We argued about whether he fired me or not, so I quit.  “Without warning?” he asked.  As you can tell by this run-on paragraph, I still get riled up about it.  Also, it makes for some interesting asterisking if I’m ever asked if I’ve been fired.

So these kinds of companies can stay in business for years and decades.  What a world.

Also, it makes me wonder what sort of market I’ve moved into here where good Web designers, or at least self-confident Web designers, start at $14 an hour.

I’m cruising a low-end user site, and a flashing, garish ad greets me:

Click for full size

Of course, they want the flashing border to capture your attention.  You know what got mine immediately: misspelling the word receive.

I before E except after C except in a scam, I guess.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal conducted a survey and came up with 7 things developers think.  Of course, they asked developers, so the developers answered, and CIOs are supposed to use these truths to define their IT strategies.  Huh.

Here’s the abbreviated list from the magazine:

1. RIAs Are For Real
2. Wide Use Of Open Source
3. Virtualization, Cloud Use Evolves
4. Multilingual Developers Emerge
5. Young Developers Drawn To Dynamic Languages
6. Agile Processes Resonate
7. Developers As An Untapped Source Of Innovation

You want to know what those developers are really thinking?  Here, let QA tell you:

1. RIAs Are For Real
   I need to get RIA work on my resume.  Can we do something with them?
2. Wide Use Of Open Source
   I have no budget.  Alternatively, I started using this stuff when I was in college because I had no budget then, and we’re going to use it now even though more robust solutions are available because I’m comfortable with them.  Also, I can get bits and pieces of the application I’m writing from some server in the Czech Republic for free, and by the time you’re sued for using it without paying for it/the Russians steal not only our customers’ identities but some of their pets as well, I will be using my RIA experience in a higher paying architect position.
3. Virtualization, Cloud Use Evolves
   Cloud is awesome because I can just slam code up there without putting it through a build process/testing/a second thought at all.
4. Multilingual Developers Emerge
   I’ve been job hopping so much, I don’t have time nor the attention span to actually learn a single language enough to learn it thoroughly.
5. Young Developers Drawn To Dynamic Languages
   Hey!  Something shiny! 
6. Agile Processes Resonate
   Formalizing all the foolish, thoughtless, and unforesighted things I would normally do?  Sign me up!  I’ll call it agile, and the business interests won’t know the difference.
7. Developers As An Untapped Source Of Innovation
   I am a genius, like Ricola Tesla.  Listen to me, and make me an executive, now, you twit!

There, now you know.  And you can discard whatever a developer tells you and get on with business.

Shaktoolik: The feeling that you have when you have been going toward a place for so long that it seems that you will never get there.

Be sure to use that word in a meeting about the current project that keeps getting features added, changes made, and the client’s whimsy indulged while the release date recedes into the future.

(Word source.)

In addition to another response to the St. Louis job listing I noted yesterday, we find another case of Craigslist backlash in Minnesota today.  Is it cropping up everywhere, or are my loyal Minneapolitano readers joining in the fun?

First, the job posting:

Click for full size

The riposte:

Click for full size

To misquote Dwight Yoakum, apparently the responding designer ain’t that hungry yet.

But I wouldn’t expect to see that small company become a larger company anytime soon.  One wonders what the full time salary would be if each project is $200?  Maybe since their Web pages are served, they would go for the waiter minimum wage.

In the St. Louis area, another job seeker has lashed out at someone looking to hire.  In this case, someone specific.

The job posting:

 
Click for full size

In the interest of full disclosure, I have had some dealings with the recruiting company in question, and, boy, they sure are recruiters over there.

The riposte:

Click for full size

In which the $60 an hour designer, or the person who would be a $60 an hour designer if anyone hired him or her, shows a stunning grasp of the English language.  It sure left me speechless.  Let’s see, what is that, 19 grammatical mistakes in the rant?  I’m only skimming here.

Sounds like a lot of designers.  Put them words in your pretty Web sites and see who notices.  Probably nobody in IT but the QA you cannot afford since you’re paying the designers $60 an hour.  Or would if they had their way.

UPDATE: The next day, the following response to the response appeared:

Click for full size

The recruiter, the friend of the recruiter, or another catty designer?  You decide!

It’s called Debug the Flash/IE Integration!

Click for full size

Let’s talk about energy efficiency.  It’s efficient not to put QA energy into a project and to push the costs and aggravations of errors onto the user.  That’s proven economics law to many organizations.

Unfortunately, the user will go elsewhere.  And children won’t learn how to save energy by hectoring their parents from EnergyHog.org.

Two weeks ago, an event occurred that altered the fundamental way we describe our locus within the space-time continuum.  That event, the New Year, means that any Web site to which you added content since then needs to have an updated copyright date:

Click for full size

 If you’re working in PHP, such as a blog, here’s a PHP script to make it dynamic.

Another thing to check is for any recurring contests on your sites, such as stories that you ask users to share, to make certain that your terms, conditions, and rules extend to the new calendar year.

Trisherino enumerates five things developers and designers could do to reduce the number of obvious issues testers will find: 5 Tips to Thwart Testers.

They’re obvious, and they’re pretty good ideas, but your organization will not follow them for long, even if your team catches on.  Why?  Because institutional memory is fluid.  By the time you drum that into your developers’ and designers’ heads, they move onto a different teams or onto different companies.  They will be replaced by people who are less expensive and less knowledgeable or they will be replaced with experienced sticks in the mud who know the right way to do things: their way.

And their way does not include to stooping to IE.

And so it goes.

The best you can hope for is to become such an archetypal nemesis to your developers and designers that they carry the fear of you beyond your team and company so that they do things the right way even when they’re somewhere else.  Somewhere, some lucky QA professional will get a n00b on their team that does things right.