QA Hates You

There are three kinds of workers in IT: Developers, QA, and collateral damage.

Someone over at FoxNews.com uses Microsoft Word to create his or her posts:

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And, apparently, someone does not preview content before pushing it live.

Sadly, I grabbed this screenshot last night, and although most of it has been fixed, detritus remains in the copy.

Yeah, that’s the ticket:

Banner ad rotators: Is there one that actually works right all the time?  We may never know, but I certainly doubt it.

Maybe I need a separate category for these screw-ups.

When one browser dies, another rises to join the pantheon:

Google Inc is set to introduce on Tuesday a new Web browser designed to more quickly handle video-rich applications, posing a challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics.

This browser will probably eat into Firefox’s market share, as some of the hip developers switch to using it instead.  Maybe some civilians will try it out, but probably the same civilians out there who run Firefox.  I don’t expect Roberta to run right out and adopt it, and I expect the same tightly locked down businesses that don’t allow installation of Firefox on business computers will not rush right out and allow installation of Chrome.

Still, it will prove to be one more example of your organization’s developers writing code that works on a browser with geek cachet and then complaining when you tell them to make sure it works in IE.

At DailyWTF, a reader offers another object lesson in having clever developer messages, not for public consumption, consumed by the public.

Whereas the article at DailyWTF talks about the hard-coded messages within the application, remember, ungentle reader, that QA also has the chance to enter badness into the system when creating junk data for testing (see Keeping Your Test Data Clean).

Developers need to assume that the impossible error condition will occur (assuming the application even works, that is), and QA needs to assume that the business stakeholders will be stupid enough to use the test environment for demos or for milestone meetings with the client.

As some sort of perception/perspective gimmick, Gojko Adzic asks how many points there are to a star.

I got your QA answer right here, buddy: There is no point to the star.  Destroy it.

If you’re not in the business to serve your own nihilism, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.

A posting on craigslist in the Software Jobs section:

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This is a quality assurance for manufacturing, not software quality assurance, but one wonders if the recruiter knows the difference or cares as long as he or she gets a warm body and the percentage off the top.  Manufacturing quality deals mostly with established processes and procedures designed to help manufacturing large numbers of the same things day in and day out.  SQA, as you know, deals with a single SNAFU evolving over a long period of time using unproven technologies wielded by hubris-riven kids out of a four year program in learning Visual Basic.

Some of the skills can transfer over in the abstract, I’m sure, but I canceled my ASQ membership because it was so manufacturing and pharmaceutical intense and I did not get much insight I could apply to SQA except maybe some terminiology to impress my boss and to throw around statistically-based meetings, if I cared to throw them.

To do an SQA job effectively, you’ve got to be rat-mean and weasel-devious to figure out how to go outside the lines that the business analysts and developers have drawn.  You’ve got to suss out crazy alternative workflows and incomplete paths and intermediate states to try to grab as many of a practically infinite number of points of failure.  It’s a little different from looking at a graph and thinking, “Hmm, maybe we should lubricate the punch press every 16 hours.”

Also, when contacting the recruiter, remember not to call their contractors “Kelly Girls.”  That violates their trademark, which instead of being violated is mostly forgotten in the 21st century.  Way to protect a trademark!

Bizjournals.com offers good advice with its latest e-mail’s subject line:

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If I waited too long to adjust to my ma, I got a whuppin.  Frequent whuppins led me to a career in QA, where one can abuse others and get paid for it.

Okay, this one does not occur in nature, but man, if only:

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Today’s term: a zool.

Zool: a row in a database, added via an INSERT command, or rendered in the presentation layer (client application or Web interface) that is expected to contain information, but because of defective behavior of the software does not.

In context:  “There is no data, only Zool.”‘

It’s best said in a demonic voice, but that’s sort of redundant, since any QA communication is best spoken hellishly.

A sample of this vocabulary word below the fold, sort of. Read the rest of this entry »

g33klady sends a screen capture of another integration problem with Yahoo!  Apparently, some character is showing as broken on its news pages:

You know, Yahoo! gets a lot of play on these pages, and I’m not even a disgruntled employee or former employee.  Maybe they had word that, since Microsoft was going to acquire them, to mesh quality standards.

UPDATE: I suppose a bigger problem is that this story still displays on the front page of the Classic Mail page.  The story not only displays the characters, but is 3 days out of date.

The company formerly known as Diebold but changed its name when Diebold became a bad word due to poor quality in electronic voting machines admits that its voting machines might have lost a couple votes here and there:

 A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

Acknowledged, but not before running through the gamut of excuses:

As recently as May, Premier said the problem was not of its making but stemmed from anti-virus software that Ohio had installed on its machines. It also briefly said the mistakes could have come from human mistakes.

But the important thing, I suppose, is that Diebold met its deadlines and had the faulty software up and running in time for the elections and in time to cash the government contract checks.

Andrew Binstock asks, Is unit testing doomed?

I ask, was it anything more than a myth to begin with?  Even in the largest companies I worked for, I didn’t see any sort of developer testing processes in place.  They’re too busy updating the Wiki to waste time writing tests to check themselves.

If you’ve got a control on a subform, you really ought to make it do something, even if it’s a link.

Take, for instance, the little Add an Application subforms available on the home page of LinkedIn.com (note you have to be signed in to see them in the right sidebar).  To get this subform, you mouse over the Add an Application link and then select a subform type, such as the jobs form:

Suppose you change your mind and don’t want to add this “application” to your sidebar.  What do you do then?  Click Cancel?

Hah!  Fool!  You do not; apparently, LinkedIn GUI wizards expect you to click the X to close the application which you have not yet added.

What they’ve done is gone cheap and made the Add form look exactly like the Edit form because it’s easier that way.  Instead of altering the behavior of the Cancel link to make it behave like the Close button during the edit operation, they have just made it do nothing.

Poor form, Peter; you should never offer controls that do nothing, and especially you should not do it because you’re too lazy to write a little bit of branching logic.

Also, I might add that allowing users to open more than one Edit/Add form at one time is sort of, well, dumb.  I’ve seen this behavior in applications I’ve had to test, and sometimes instead of an AJAX subform, the application refreshes the page entirely, which either abandons or saves changes in the other subforms (where the user did not click Save) according to the developer’s behavioral preference (or accident, but I repeat myself).  Crikey, how about expecting the user to make one change at a time and guiding him or her to do it in a logical fashion?

Nah, let’s go willy-nilly and get it out the door on time so we can get in line for Halo VIII.

This is the third book in the trilogy (How to Break Software, How to Break Software Security, and this book).  This book, as you could guess by its title, focuses on applications written for the World Wide Web.

As with previous books, this one uses an enumerated list of “attacks” you can perform on the software you’re testing.  However, the “attacks” motif is a little misapplied, as the last chapters of the book are broadly constructed, including a chapter on “Privacy” and another broad overview of Web Services.

However, by focusing on differences between Web applications and regular applications (the stateless nature of the Web as well as exposed underlying technologies in the Web server and database server) that can help you transition if you’re used to working on desktop applications to the Web.  Heck, even if you’re already testing Web applications, you might find something in here to add to your repertoire.

However, read the book and apply the “attacks” in a triage fashion.  Sure, your pages’ source code might reveal something, but brothers and sisters, reviewing page code is the first attack (”Panning for Gold”) presented in the book.  It is not the first thing in my test plans.  As a matter of fact, given the projects I’ve worked on, reviewing source code has been spotty at best and falls in the test plan somewhere beyond spraying the Web server with a hose.  But if you have timeline enough and time, it is a good idea.

I bought these books for my team, so can expect I’d recommend them to you.  Go forth, buy them, and learn from them.

A poster to the ComputerWorld Shark Bait forum discovers why 214-748-3647 is such a popular phone number.

The answer, of course, is lack of quality assurance.

Unlike some rock star developer types who live in an isolated world of geekery and smug coolness amongst their peers, I dwell among actual citizens from time to time.  This gives me perspective of what life is like outside the IT world.  For example, let’s talk about Roberta^*.

Because I’m the IT guy in the family and among the family’s circle of friends, I get to be the guy to set up new computers and to look at computers when something goes wrong.  So how could I refuse when my sainted mother shanghaied me and took me to Roberta’s home to set up her new computer.  Roberta is 80 years old, and apparently fell prey to the peer pressure, wherein the peer in this case was her 15 year old grandson.  She decided to join the late 20th century by getting access to e-mail, instant messages, and the World Wide Web.

So I got to fire up her hand-me-down PC.  Upon it, Windows ME ran Internet Explorer 6.0.  I got her DSL hooked in, downloaded an IM client, and managed to find a copy of Norton 2001 to help provide some protection.  Then, I set up her bookmarks to a set of television stations (Discovery, the History Channel, and so on) and National Geographic.  I set her home page to her DSL account dashboard page and explained some basics about e-mail, such as how to send it using the Web interface and what a contact list is.

I showed her how to use the little mouse to move the little arrow.  There, in the corner, watch it move, now see how the arrow turns into a hand, that’s called a link, you click it: that means press the left mouse button.  If you take your hand off of the mouse, you move the arrow a little, so the button does nothing.  Here, try with your hand on the mouse.

I mean, she lacked all of the basics of computer and GUI use that we’ve taken for granted for the last decade, including the vocabulary such as operating system, window, browser, e-mail, application, double-click.  She’d heard some of them, but she had no idea what they were.  To her, Web sites were extensions of things she saw on television.  Browse, Google, Web searches, blogs, and so on.  She’s been online for a couple of weeks, sort of, and when she asks me to add a URL to her bookmarks, she has it written down on a piece of paper as she’s seen it on a product or on television.

When I left her the first time, I realized I had not shown her how to close a window with the little x in the corner; surely enough, when I visited her again, she had 16 instances of IE open on her taskbar, and her underpowered machine was crawling.

What’s my point?  If you’re developing consumer applications or work at an interactive marketing agency, you’d better remember that people like Roberta are your target audience.  Not the people at the next agency who are going to look at your portfolio when you try for the next level of title.  Not your circle of friends where you try to one-up each other in cool things you do.  You’re designing and developing for civilians, and many unsophisticated civilians at that.

^{* Not her real name because she’s on the Internet now, and I don’t want her to know I’m talking about her.}

Courtesy of this e-mail from Bizjournals.com:

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As a reminder, also, Internet Explorer displays the value of the alt attribute on mouseover, but Firefox, Safari, and the other cool kids’ faves use the value of the img tag’s title attribute.  So if you’re going to check it, you have to check either in the source code or in both browser.  I prefer both browsers, of course, since it’s faster to mouse over the image in two browsers than to view the source code and look through it for the values of both attributes for each image.

Pizza Hut has more trouble with its new technologies as it blasts test e-mails to actual customers:

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I didn’t get the e-mail myself; instead, one-time commenter The QA Slayer passed it on.  I understand that the test e-mail offered 99 cent pizzas.

Remember, this is not the first time Pizza Hut’s interactive agency has rolled 1 on its hit roll (that’s a critical fumble to those of you too good to have played D&D).

A page on the Telegraph Web site throws a JavaScript alert box with a passed-through error message:

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It’s a problem with a content rotator or ad server, I suspect.  On the other hand, maybe I got lucky and it didn’t serve me the malware its hackers intended.