A short video explains how Southwest Airlines tries to determine if candidates for its open positions have a sense of humor:
Having a good drawing-and-quartering sense of humor (gallows humor is too humane for our line of work) will help one survive the software development industry. How important is it to you, and how do you go about finding it in candidates?
(Link seen here.)
At a little after 7am this morning, I tweeted:
In about an hour, I’ll be participating in the crowd-sourced load testing of http://Packers.com http://bit.ly/ucICSO Good luck, everyone.
A couple of near-timeouts later and some really, really long load times, and I’m the proud owner of one share of Green Bay Packers stock. It’s fewer shares than I own of the startup where I used to work, but they’re worth about the same.
At any rate, two hours after I tweeted, the first news reports about the slow Web response time appeared:
On Twitter, fans were reporting that the it was difficult to access the website – www.packersowner.com – or the toll-free line: 855-8-GOPACK.
Murphy and other team officials said they anticipated there would be high demand. “Have patience,” Murphy told reporters at a news conference Tuesday morning. “Be patient.”
Who could have expected that this would have occurred? Anyone with dramatic Web launch experience.
UPDATE: More on that great tsunami here:
Sarah Johnson, 34, of Portage said it took her nearly 20 minutes to complete what should have been a 30-second process, but it was worth to wait.
… The team received 1,600 orders in the first 11 minutes of the sale, said Packers president Mark Murphy, who had to reassure fans the Packers website was still working. Team spokesman Aaron Popkey said he did not have any sales data as of early Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s just a question of volume,” Murphy said. “Fans are excited about this opportunity. We just encourage fans to be patient.”
150 orders a minute. What, were they running it in development?
On the wrong side of the table. Matt Heusser on being in IT over the age of 35:
No, what struck me were the people.
All of the people I met — and I mean all of them — had this sort of early-twenties look to them. Like the characters in Microserfs, these were “firstees”, young adults in the middle of the first things like life: First job out of college, first house, first child, first mini-van.
All of them.
The google t-shirts, while not universal, were ubiquitous; you couldn’t walk twenty feet without running into someone in Google-wear. Conversations about relocation tended to center on corporate housing, which sounded well … something between a good room and an apartment.
Well, I should be careful, here. Every now and again you’d run into someone in his early 30’s, trying to act inconspicuous, perhaps with a beard, glasses, or both.
These were the managers, almost certainly on their first management job.
I mean, these are people who refer to the extra weight you gain in the first six month as the “freshman fifteen.”
With my grey hair and, and, well, senior sixty, I kinda stuck out like a sore thumb.
I’ve sat in on a couple of those interviews, with a resume that stretches back over a decade and that still lists technologies like RoboHelp, WinRunner, and OpenVMS in the furthest reaches of ancient history (the 20th Century? How….quaint).
You know what else the urchins have highlighted? The fact that I have an English and Philosophy degree, and not a modern 21st century computer science degree like they do.
What should someone on the other side of 35 do? Pretty much what Matt says. But I’d like to offer the following additional tips, old man:
…. …., … ….
I SAID, “GOOD LUCK, OLD MAN.”
Who amongst us hasn’t been a bad, bad boy? Ozzy Osbourne with "Flying High Again" from the 1981 album Diary of a Madman.
The Startup: A Less Productive Alternative to Unemployment — powered by Cracked.com
Working off site is cool, because the mute button can hide your screams.
Last night, this video about what motivates people made the rounds on Twitter:
It’s an interesting summation of Dan Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
At first blush, you might think it does not agree much with my list of priorities with a job. My top item:
I want money. I’m not in this to change the world. I am a mercenary with a good skill set. I want a good paycheck. Also, they tell me benefits are important. But if you’re not going to offer me good compensation, I’m not going to work there.
The emphasis of the talk is on other things to empower and motivate people (autonomy, mastery, and purpose). But lower in hierarchy of needs remains money. From Dan Pink’s talk:
Fact: Money is a motivator at work, but in a slightly strange way. If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. What’s curious about that, there’s another paradox there which is that the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money, and they’re thinking about the work.
Too many organizations are going to take away from that talk that money isn’t important and the other things will motivate employees to work for the company at a discount. Kind of like HR people trying to sell you that the staff bowling parties, free sodas, and great atmosphere of an organization is worth $25,000 in annual salary. It’s not the way to go, because other companies are going to catch on and start moving in this direction–so many have already–that underpaid employees (and employees who wonder if they’re underpaid) are going to wonder whether the grass would be just as green and the salary more green at that company up the road.
A Cracked list: The 8 Creepiest Glitches Hidden In Popular Video Games.
Ford owners getting a software update for their vehicles will have the chance to perform the software updates themselves:
If you’re on of the 300,000 or so customers out there with MyFord Touch, you’re already on the list to receive a USB flash drive containing the update. You’ll be able to do it yourself or take it to any dealership.
With this major upgrade, Ford is delivering on their promise to keep your tech up-to-date as long as you own the car. “Evolving the software with meaningful enhanced features was part of our plan from the very beginning. It’s no different than the experience with our smartphones and laptop computers – except now, it’s your car that gets better,” Jablonski added.
You can find tips on testing software installers here.
(Link seen here, along with the quip “Is it possible to brick an entire car? We’re about to find out.”)
The leader of the largest independent advertising company does it differently:
After more than four decades in business, there are certain things that Stan Richards, the 78-year-old founder of The Richards Group, believes to be true. Employees, for one, must arrive by 8:30 a.m. (not 8:30-ish-they have to punch in). Time spent on the job must be accounted for in 15-minute increments, daily. Fail to do so, and you’ll be docked $8.63. Arrive promptly to meetings or be shut out of them. Close of business is 6 p.m. Finish your work and go home.
Given all that, you could be forgiven for concluding that Richards runs a widgetmaker or a call center or a print shop—the kind of operation in which work needs to be highly regimented to get done efficiently. In fact, The Richards Group is an advertising agency.
And not just any advertising agency. Founded in 1976, The Richards Group is the largest independently owned ad shop in the country, with billings of $1.28 billion, revenue of $170 million, and more than 650 employees. Its portfolio is packed with some of the most memorable campaigns of the past 30 years. Chick-fil-A’s famous cows, those alluring Corona beer ads with couples lounging on the beach, Motel 6′s “We’ll Leave the Light on for You”… all were born at Richards’s Dallas headquarters. Most recently, and infamously, the agency went perhaps a bit too far, sparking a nationwide controversy with a set of startlingly direct ads for Summer’s Eve cleansing wash. The spots declared “Hail to the V”; some cheekily used hand puppets to play the roles of multiracial talking vaginas.
Highly structured and rules-bound companies, of course, are not supposed to produce work like this. “Creative” industries such as advertising, software design, and the like are supposed to require a loose, anything-goes culture, in which workers are free to come, go, and dress as they please. It’s a world of verdant campuses, foosball tables, and caffeine-fueled all nighters. Introduce things such as start times, end times, and time sheets—rules—and watch your creatives run for the exits. Richards, obviously, feels differently. “We need to be disciplined,” he explains. “We are not gallery painters who paint when the feeling moves us.” And Richards has made it work. The 29 creative group heads at Richards’s shop have an average tenure of 17 years. “The genius of the place is completely counterintuitive,” says David Fowler, who wrote the landmark Motel 6 spots back in 1986 and today is the executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather in New York City. “Somehow, Stan made you feel like you were only limited by the size of your ideas.”
A lot of organizations run towards the latest fads in development methodology or towards the common pop-culture representations of how things are done, but different organizations can succeed outside the vogue. One wonders if this agency would have reached that level of success doing things differently, that is, like everyone else does. I doubt it.
Content management systems, ya gotta love them. Unless, of course, you’re a professional quality assurance professional who likes to make sure that every i is dotted, t is crossed, and serial comma is twisted. Then CMS packages are scary. They allow just anyone to get in there and throw something up onto the Internet that the whole world can see and mock. I’ve often maintained that if you’re going to use CMS, you still need to have a two-person system at the very least. One to type it up and one to preview it.
To keep something like this from going where it will scare the innocent users:
As you can see, all the appearances of li have changed to p. Forensically speaking, we can ascertain that someone changed this from a bulleted list and used search-and-replace to do it.
Never, never, ever, do a blind search-and-replace on your text. And have someone else look at it before it’s scattered across the Internet.
A profile in the Wall Street Journal identifies a costly boundary analysis failure for Amazon.com:
At launch, the site wasn’t even truly finished. Mr. Bezos’s philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it. Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos: “We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books.”
Remember, 0 isn’t the smallest number to test.
You know the common first program given in any class displays the phrase Hello World on the computer screen?
Yeah, that’s starting them off right. With a defect.
The “world” is a noun of direct address. Ergo, the phrase lacks a comma and should be Hello, world.
Speaking of classes, I’ve taken a couple or four language programming classes in the community college, and although they’ve focused on writing applications (or ceaselessly computing meaningless formulas using Java arrays) that do what they’re supposed to, but instructors never mentioned implications of quality assurance and testing. Maybe they thought the program would include it later, but at the time (the late 1990s), kids were coming into the field with nothing but those couple of classes at the community college. Those same kids are now the VPs. Makes sense, don’t you think?
In this case, it’s a JavaScript error:
In this case, the partner passing an invalid character did not cause a catastrophic failure; instead, it spit up a JavaScript error and probably screwed up some user tracking metrics somewhere.
But what happens when your trusted partners pass your applications crap? And what’s with this “trusted” business? Your organization’s partners have less QA than you do. You need to test every little thing they pass to your application or Web site and make sure they won’t blow you up. Additionally, you need to test what happens when you pass things over there to make sure your mistakes won’t blow you up. And test to see what happens if your trusted partner isn’t there when you need it.
Any shared application programming interfaces, any interfaces period, require proper and suitable testing because software can fat-finger data, too. Just more efficiently and faster than humans.
Stltoday.com, the Internet site of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, lives up to its name this morning, as it serves up fatal errors for St. Louis Cardinals fans seeking heart:
Trying to allocate 42 bytes led to this fatal error.
Although configuration of the server and the processes in the ops department are not the purview normally of QA, as the normal harbinger of doom, you can always ask, “What happens if we run out of server memory?” and “What happens if the database logs fill up?” Load testing might find these, but if you’re testing in a staged environment that gets cleaned out after every test run, you’re going not going to find out what happens when the crud accumulates in the pipes through daily usage. But it will be your fault for not finding it in performance testing.
So ask the unthinkable questions just to get someone thinking about them.
Larry Tieman in Information Week talks about how to avoid career-killing software projects and mentions the importance of elevating QA to an equal position as development:
Testing the software is yet another opportunity to bring in an independent perspective and reduce risk. Several years ago, I converted an application VP position to a testing VP position and formed an independent test organization. My intention was to put testing on the same footing as development, improve the quality of critical software, and give me another voice in a project. That VP also reported directly to me.
As you might know, I’m a big proponent of this sort of organization, partly because I was in a similar position in my last full-time posting as a Director who reported directly to the CEO and got to unabashedly air grievances where they would be heard.
Your quality assurance should not just be a cog in your development wheel where the process keeps rolling regardless. QA should be a log in the wheel’s path. All right, go ahead, submit the defect report for failed metaphor. That’s not working.
But you get the idea, or at least you get my repetition of the theme. Hey, repetition…. QA is the rumble strip of software development…. Someone stop me before I metaph again.
When can you say that phrase unironically? ABC News’s blog reports on the heir to Stuxnet, Duqu:
Duqu is designed to record key strokes and gather other system information at companies in the industrial control system field and then send that information back to whomever planted the bug, Symantec said.
Look at the Symantec posting to which ABC News refers. Find the word ‘bug’ in it? Me, either. Because Symantec knows computer terminology.
QAHY grants you permission to say say “It’s not a bug; it’s a feature” only when refering to someone reporting on technology thinks bug is a synonym for Trojan horse.
A do-it-yourself email communication shows a few flaws:
You know what the most basic bit of quality assurance is? Having someone else look at it.
I know some smaller companies don’t have great budgets for proofreaders, testers, or professionals of any stripe to handle their client communication needs. Or maybe they have a marketing intern on staff. Whatever. Your organization should never send something out, particularly a formal communication, without someone other than the writer/designer reviewing it.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to send yourself the email before you blast it to the subscription list, since the missing text and extraneous nonbreaking-space-missing its-semicolon might not display in the WYSAWTS (What You See Ain’t What They See) editor that assembles your text, your logo, your custom text, and your address into the final product.
Come on, have someone else look at it. It’s what the professionals do.
Twitter added the common social media widget that allows you to Tell a Friend by sending invitation emails to people you know. They put a lot of thought into the design, as you can see by the fact that the instructions are nearly invisible against the default background color:
It’s nice of Twitter to hide the spoiler and compel you to highlight the test to read it.
SPOILER ALERT! You can send to multiple email addresses by separating them with commas.
You know what job interview question I hate to get and don’t like to ask? The commonplace general “Why do you want this position / do you want to work here?” question. I admit, I’ve fumbled on it a bit when asked. Sure, you’ve done some research on the company, you have a sense about what they do, and maybe you have talked to someone working there and get some inside information. Maybe not. Regardless, they’re asking me what I would think about the company from the inside while I’m on the outside.
I mean, regardless of the company, I want the following things when I take a job:
That’s what I want from any job, and here’s a dirty little secret: Outside of the assembly line, every employer will tell you that’s what it offers. I guess the answer gives the interviewer a sense of your priorities or something. Or maybe it’s one of the basic things the HR schools say you must ask, or the interviewers just remember getting asked that question at every job interview they’ve ever been to. When interviewing, I don’t ask it. Meaningless, I tell you.
On the other hand, a bit of a riposte is to ask your interviewer or interviewers, “How long have you been here? Why are you here?” Someone working at the company knows what it’s like to work there and what the company offers its employees, or at least the employees sitting in on your interview.
I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, but if you’re from Wisconsin, you idolize Vince Lombardi, or you’re a heretic. He coached the Green Bay Packers, the small-market blue collar National Football League (fútbol norteamericano, not soccer, you international readers) and led them to something like 14 annual championships in 8 years. He was that good.
Now, you might ask yourself what a football coach from fifty years ago can teach you about quality assurance management. If you don’t read anything but quality assurance books, you’re only going to read what other people think. Crikey, you do understand you have to get outside those narrow channels of thought designed by someone else to synthesize your own knowledge, and reading outside the industry can do that. What are you, a Bears fan? (Patriots fan: If you weren’t in that lesser American conference, you wouldn’t be much better.)
At any rate, a couple lessons distilled from The Coach:
That’s some of the reminders I got from this book, wrapped in a different metaphor (football) that makes it fresh. Your insights might vary. But, jeez, read something besides the industry standard material to make sure you think differently from the industry standard.
