The Horror…

Let me start by saying yes – it’s been over a month since I posted here. Frankly, I haven’t been feeling very inspired about QA lately. It’s possible I may give up this blog all together. (I still have a personal, non-QA blog and a “mommy blog” that I post to pretty regularly. Email me if you’d like links.) But I did see something yesterday that I had to mention.

I read a post yesterday about excuses that testers often use for not finding bugs. Frankly, I thought it was horrible, and I’m not going to even link to it here, but if you read Testing Reflections, you saw it. I’m not going to address the content of the post, really, though I will mention I thought it was mostly asinine. No, what horrified me most about this particular post was the atrocious grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Or perhaps I should say lack of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It was, quite possibly, the most poorly written thing I’ve ever seen that was supposed to have been written by a professional in the field of quality. Do you see the irony?

It is probable that the author of that post is not a native speaker of English. NO EXCUSE! That is not, and has never been, a valid excuse for publishing a piece of writing that is so poorly executed it’s nearly unreadable. We’re not talking about an internal email among colleagues (although I personally would find that just as annoying), this was a published post on a blog about quality. If you don’t feel your grasp of English is sufficient, have someone proofread and copy edit for you. How can anyone take you seriously, writing on a topic related to quality, when the quality of your own effort is so obviously shoddy? When you apparently did not care enough to either look up the correct spellings, grammatical usage, etc. yourself; or get someone else to do it for you if you are not competent enough?

If you didn’t see the blog post in question, do yourself a favor – just take my word for it. It was truly a piece of crap. Don’t try to find it and read it yourself, because it will make you want to stab your own eyes out with a rusty fork. Reading it is like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, with a migraine, and a hangover, while someone blows cigar smoke in your face. Please spare yourself the frustration.

Google Chrome

I just read through this very clever comic book explaining Google’s new browser, which they’re releasing tomorrow. I have to say, it was VERY effective – both in explaining to me what makes Chrome different, and in getting me excited about trying out Chrome! Sadly, my corporate overlords will probably prevent me from installing Chrome at work for the foreseeable future (they haven’t even approved Firefox 3 yet). But I can certainly beat the heck out of it at home!

Another reason I loved this comic book thing was all the great information that’s included for just about every tech audience. Specifically, there was some really interesting information about the QA efforts on Chrome, and how the team uses automated and manual testing, how they select their test data set, and what their goals are for testing Chrome.

Wow! I’m really getting geeked up for Google Chrome! Hmm…I better bring my Macbook Pro to work with me tomorrow…

Take The Survey

A List Apart is running their annual survey “for people who make websites.” Back when I started in software testing, very little of what I did had much to do with websites or web applications. Now it’s 99.99% of what I deal with on a daily basis. In fact, the only time in the past two years that I’ve worked on anything other than a website or web app, it was a mobile app on cell phones!

Anyway, if you’re involved in the web in just about any way at all (designer, developer, blogger, tester, manager), be sure to take the survey.

Let People Subscribe to Your Feed

This post isn’t about QA in the strictest sense, though you could argue it touches on the ideas of usability and user experience, which are things I often have to test for. It also deals with one of my pet peeves, which makes it fair game for my own blog. That peeve is this: people who don’t make a subscribe option obvious for their own blogs. If you have a blog, there is one commandment you must, MUST follow: allow people to subscribe. I would even go so far as to say make it easy for them to subscribe. To take it even further, please syndicate your full content and not just lame two-sentence snippets or (God forbid) post titles only, but I understand that’s harder for people to come to grips with.

Back to allowing for easy subscription, let me point you to some examples. If you’re reading this blog through a feed reader – good for you. If you wouldn’t mind, click through (usually on the post title) to hit the actual website where this feed comes from. If you’re reading on the website already, keep going. Notice in the upper right corner of the page, there’s a button that looks much like the one at the beginning of this post. That’s the universal symbol for syndicated content. That means you can easily click on it and see the RSS (or atom, or whatever) feed for the blog, and then subscribe to it with your reader of choice. I went one step farther and even put a text link next to the button, which wasn’t strictly necessary, but I like to make things obvious.

Now, let’s look at some other sites that I really like, but unfortunately do not make it easy for the reader to subscribe, if she can subscribe at all.

What Liz Said. Here’s an awesome blog with an impressive amount of content, the kind of feed I’d LOVE to sink my teeth into. But look up and down the page. Go ahead – it’s long, but I’ll wait. Notice she’s got all kinds of awesome widgets going – recent posts, recent comments, tags, currently reading, etc., etc. What’s missing? Any kind of subscription option, that’s what! Luckily there’s a workaround. Most blogging software will automatically generate a feed for you, even if you choose not to publicize it (of course if you’re serious about this stuff then you want to use Feedburner, but that’s another post). When I can’t find a feed link anywhere on a blog’s front page (or supporting pages), I append one of the following to the URL: /feed, /rss, /rss.xml, /atom, /atom.xml. Eventually you an usually find a feed that way, and that’s how I was able to add the feed for “What Liz Said” to my Google Reader.

Why I Hate DC. A snarky local blog that I have enjoyed reading for over a year now, Why I Hate DC was recently turned over to a new editor/writer, after the previous one moved to Columbus, Ohio (ironically, I moved from here from Columbus). So far she hasn’t made many changes, which is unfortunate. I think the page design is kind of outdated, though I can live with it, but what annoys me most, of course, is the fact that the subscribe option is, again, hidden. No button or link is apparent, and you have to do the sneaky “append /atom.xml” trick to get it. Compounding the irritation, once you do subscribe to this feed, it’s one of those annoyingly truncated ones, so you still have to click through to the site to read a full post. But at least it lets me know if there’s anything up there I’m interested in on any given day.

The Art of the Title Sequence. “Art of the Title…” is a reformed candidate, because it now offers a feed! HURRAY! In fact, easy-to-find links to both web and iTunes feeds are now posted, right at the top of the page. This is one of my most favorite sites/blogs, and I could spend hours just browsing the archives. And now there’s a feed, so I don’t have to click back every few days to see if something new has been posted. WIN.

So remember: if you blog, syndicate. For more technical information about RSS, see this Wikipedia article.

Perfect Software

Thanks to James Bach, I became aware today of a new book about software testing, Perfect Software
—And Other Illusions About Testing. You can pre-order it right here, which I almost did. Almost. Pre-ordering will get you 20% off the cover price, which is a good deal. Unfortunately, you have to pay for UPS ground shipping at a total of $10.75! My stingy, greedy little heart froze at that, and I cancelled my Paypal shopping cart. It looks like a great book, but I think I’ll wait until I can get it on Amazon, and take advantage of my Prime membership for free 2-day shipping.

In other topics, I’m prepared to be the lone tester* at the upcoming Agile IT! Experience conference in Reston at the end of the month. If by some chance you’ll be there, leave me a comment or drop me a line. Always good to see other QA enthusiasts.

*Of course I don’t know that I’ll actually be the only tester in attendance, but when I go to things like this that are not testing-specific, and more generally about agile development, I usually am.