Seth Godin put up a good post about the difference between trust and trustiness. He mostly pointed at corporations that showed their trustiness through PR campaigns and made a pretty strong comment about it in the last few paragraphs:

The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable, trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers.

The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.

Combine this with James Bach’s guide to faking a test project (that’s a pdf link) and you can probably guess where I’m going with this.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how test is dead. Whether it’s being sarcastic about when test can be dead or the definition of testing. Testing is still very much alive, but is still evolving.

Tying this into the Trustiness idea again. As a tester, are you trusted or do you ooze trustiness? Are you submitting bug reports to look busy or as you find them? Taking a note from faking a test project: how detailed are your bug reports? How much do the developers you work with trust your bug reports when they see them?

Companies are always looking for ways to save money. Regardless of how people centric they are, they need to spend the least possible and make the most possible. Too many times testers get the short end of the stick in regards to timelines, resources, and budget. How do you stay relevant in your organization and prove that the money spent on you is worthwhile?

With stories about test being dead and end-users getting used to seeing bugs in their free/beta/trial software out there end up with quotes like this from Testjutsu:

At Google, the majority of the tools they produce are free for the end user. Their model is based on building things that people will use (for free) and building advertising into it. If it doesn’t work perfectly, oh well. It’s not like you’re paying money for it.

However, an increasing amount of times there are large bugs in paid for apps, OSes and Hardware. Which lead to posts titled “Software Bugs are a Regular Part of Smartphone Life for Windows Phone and Android users“.

I’m not trying to say that you should release something only when all bugs are fixed because that would take too long to release. But a bug that’s considered minor or not reported internally can come across as an issue that affects the trust level of the brand. This, in turn, can could come back on you because “Why didn’t you find that during testing”.

So are you trusted or full of trustiness?

 Image Credit: elycefeliz on Flickr

We use TestLink at Clockwork. I have a love/hate relationship with this software. I love the fact that there’s a place to store tests, display tests while executing, and get reports during execution times. I hate using the software. This includes creating test cases and plans. The entry method is a hodgepodge of rich text fields and the tab order isn’t all that intuitive. Making it even worse is that copy/pasting text that you’ve created into the fields is SLOW since the editor on page can’t access the machine’s clipboard directly and has to popup another field so that you can paste it in.

Solution for entry: My coworker Leaf made a converter using markup so that we could create test plans and tests in a plain text file and then convert it to the xml that TestLink requires for importing. It’s kind of awesome. Here’s his post on the creation of the program and here’s the github link so you can get it for yourself.

I wrote a blog post over at my employer’s blog called “Don’t make it hard for me to do the right thing“. You should read it.

I’m not going to post the full text over here for the sake of not having duplicate content on the web. However, I just want to say that the entire process was not only hugely frustrating, but extremely rewarding. The following assumes that you’ve read the link above.

That post morphed from a detailed one listing how the vulnerability was executed to a story about the ethics of reporting. It was extremely difficult to keep the detail out of the post while still providing good context. It also helped the have a few amazing editors looking at it to make the story flow better and be more smoothly told.

The original XSS bug I found was that you could comment as anyone you wanted to on the first newspaper site, but that quickly turned into posting executable javascript as a username and potentially doing whatever I wanted to.

In the first response from the CRM after reporting the vulnerability not only did they blow me off and treat like I was one of their clients, but they feigned responsibility for any of it and put it back on me (the apparent client) to fix templates. This tells me that they KNEW ABOUT IT but only offered tips on how not to do it.

I almost gave up at that point, but this was after I’d already started communications with the sites that were vulnerable therefore I already had a relationship in place with people that this actually affected and I wasn’t going to cause more work for them by giving up. That, and I’d promised not to go public with anything until they had a chance to fix it.

The final contact to the CRM was just plain out of boredom. I was desperate because a plea to the sales channel, the online chat that no one is ever online with (even during business hours) and calls to the support/sales lines since they’re one-in-the-same.

I’m still glad I waited. I’ve got some decent new contacts.

Google Reader for Android recently made an update the allows you to go the next item in your feed by swiping to the right (previous to the left).

I hate it. It drives me crazy.

I am constantly accidentally flipping to the next or previous item prematurely. The worst part about it all is that when I go back to what I was reading it’s back at the top of the post. This is a horrible experience when reading longer write-ups from anybody.

It’s not only Google Reader that’s the issue. Blogger displays on my phone are also subject to the swiping of my time. Google+ for Android has it now as well.

But why is this such a problem for me? I’m human.

Touchscreens recognize the input of multiple “Swipe Up” patterns in order to move down a page. This is where the problem starts. A swipe up pattern that moves slightly to the left or right can also initiate a left or right command.

Because of the fact that I’m human, the movements my fingers make aren’t perfect. I never make a perfect swipe up or any other direction for that matter.

Of course since blogger mobile has this ‘feature’ as well the issue compounds itself with blogs that don’t post their full feed content to RSS and require me to click through to read the rest of the post. They usually get a few more page views due to this issue.

Of course since one of those sites is Michael Larsen’s Test Head I can’t help myself but to look at the seeming lack of coverage for this feature from a testing perspective. The good news is that it definitely passed with flying colors. When you swipe left you get the previous, when you swipe right you get the next item. Good, done, closing this ticket. The problem is when you move slightly right while moving up, should that initiate the next post to display?

Was this even a testing issue? Should the requirements that the engineer had to go on been more specific? Maybe there should have been a pause to allow for a more deliberate motion.

Whatever the answer is, this wouldn’t have annoyed me nearly as much if there was a simple setting in the application that let me turn it off.

As software testers, we are called on to deliver bad news first, good news second. We sometimes shoot from the hip in an ask questions later type of method just to make sure the bug gets logged before it gets forgotten and comes back to bite the company, and possibly yourself, in the ass. This works well, as long as you have a good set of steps and the backup of documentation for why it’s a bug, you’re good to go. However, we often carry that personality feature beyond our project code which often turns out to be a bug in the new context.

When we go beyond code in our testing we can very easily be seen as arrogant and ignorant. Don’t get stuck in testing mode when you task switch to replying to emails. Make sure you’re reporting in the correct place when you don’t have your tracking system to depend on. An incorrect reply with what could end up being invalid information will come across as disrespectful to the people involved in your reply.

So, keep filing those bugs, and keep looking at the finer detail points to make the software you test the best software that it can be. Just make sure that you turn that blunt part of your brain off when it’s not required.

That’s what I was thinking after I read about the South Carolina Gamecocks being told to change to their normal jerseys during warmups of the game where they were going to wear Under Armor’s “Wounded Warrior” Jerseys.

The link above is a little bit non-obvious to what is really the problem (since they show the regular jersey’s as the first picture). But if you look at the second picture on that article you’ll see the issue. Although this story shows the preview of the jerseys.

I can imagine a conference room filled with Under Armour executives, designers, South Carolina representatives, and miltary representatives. A large conference room for all those people lit with florescent light that brought out the labels on the jerseys.

It’s probably even worse that the jerseys were special so they wouldn’t even be worn on game day. Once they did, the referees had a hard time reading the numbers so they told South Carolina to change to their normal home uniforms

So please, testers, consider the environment that your product is going to be used in or it may be scrubbed altogether.

The good news to this is that Under Armour is auctioning off the jersey’s to support the Wounded Warrior Project. (I couldn’t find the link for that auction and I somewhat doubt it’s a public one)

This question  came in from formspring:

“what is the coolest project you’ve ever worked on professionally?”

This is actually a difficult one. Even though I don’t have to do any research to do a post correctly, I have to be careful because a lot of the projects I’ve worked on since I became a software tester 10 years ago involved NDA’s. Also difficult is the fact that I’ve worked on a LOT of fun projects. I guess I’ll just have to list them.

My first testing job was at Digital River. I had never done software testing prior and this started out as a contractor position. A few months later I started on one of the most exciting projects. It was for a major league sport. Their webstores for each team and the main one. The project took a lot of work and a lot of late nights, but I was never disappointed. I think the major part of the excitement for me was the fact that it was a sport I liked to watch, I got free stuff, and it was fast paced. Each year during their playoff season I’d have to wait around to see which team one and push changes to their store with the winning gear. This project was most exciting due to who the client was, but the project itself was pretty standard since it was the same type of testing I was doing for all the other clients I worked with.

The next project that I was really excited about was testing and managing the process for a web based disc copying application and the associated equipment. This was the first job that I really got to travel for. The company owned a manufacturing facility in northern California. This was my first time testing hardware and hardware integration with the software we were developing. Also, I was building assembly manuals for the products as well as helping with efficiency of the assembly line process. I don’t really enjoy travelling for business any more, but I got to do it, and at least now I know.

Now that I’m at Clockwork we’ve got a lot of awesome stuff that we’re working on. And because each project is unique regarding functionality and scope I’m constantly discovering new and exciting projects that keep trumping previous “most exciting” projects. It’s nice to be at a position that keeps challenging my way of thinking about web applications and how people interact with them.

—————————

I’m taking your advice on what to write about. Give me an idea

As a follow up to my post “Your Mobile Website Blows” I want to do something more productive. I have a decent list of things that mobile websites should have and not have, but I know that I’m probably missing some things.

So here’s your chance to get in on the action. Comment here, on my original post, on Facebook, or on Twitter. Don’t worry about regurgitating ideas that someone else has already said since I’ll take those as more important.

I’ll make sure that each of the ideas are represented in my follow up and respond with my feelings on them.

Just to let you know, I made some changes to my blog before and after that post.

Prior to that post I hadn’t put enough love into the mobile version of my own site, so yes, I was talking to myself with some of those points. Afterwards it was recommended by Bill that I remove the CAPTCHA from commenting and let Akismet deal with the spam so as to give readers from full and mobile browsers an easier way to leave comments. His own words “there is nothing more limiting to comments than those fucking things“, are very true.

I do a decent amount of browsing on my phone. Most of this browsing is done via my Blackberry Bold. However,  I also have been known to browse on my iPod Touch and the myTouch that I have. What have I found since I started browsing your mobile website? Let’s start a list:

• You’ve hard-coded a width for a specific device
• You’re using a specific domain for mobile (m.yoursite)
• Your Mdot urls are different than your wwwdot urls
• Your entire site is in flash
• Your javascript is loading at the top
• You still have two columns
• I still have to zoom in to read your content
• You don’t have full RSS feeds and I have to click through to your non-mobile site because you don’t auto-choose the style sheet presented

Let’s peer into each of these and find out why they’re an issue

You’ve hard-coded a width for a specific device

Let’s assume you made this choice consciously based on the analytics for your site visits. Now, if you’re going to take the time to exclude anyone not using that device then you should take the time to include everyone else. Not everyone uses an iPhone (the majority of sites with this issue hard-code for an iPhone screen).

I’m actually really confused by this one because I’ve seen a few sites that with this hardcoding makes it difficult to look at when you turn your phone sideways for landscape display.

Mdot verses wwwdot

Newsites are the worst for this. “Just go to m.startribune.com to see the news on your phone”.  This is a great solution if everyone you follow on Twitter or are friends with on Facebook ONLY share the Mdot versions.

People consume content from more than just their desktop machine. You should automatically assign a stylesheet for the browser that’s viewing the content.

Your Mdot urls are different than your wwwdot urls

Let’s go out on a limb (a really short limb) and say that I try to circumvent your obvious distaste for my non-desktop browsing habits and I try to manually switch the link I’m at to the Mdot version of your site. A 404 page is not content no matter how fun you try to make it look.

Your entire site is in flash

Fuck off, I didn’t want to visit your restaurant anyways…

Your javascript is loading at the top

This is just bad practice, but I’ve seen a few sites that load the javascript at the bottom of the page on their full-site and then load it at the top on the mobile version. Do you hate me? Why must I wait for your overloaded corporate tracking software to render and execute before the content even shows up. It’s bad enough that I have to look at a damned loading bar at the bottom of my screen while that stuff is executing, but now you just hate me and make me wait for it while the content downloads.

You still have two columns / I still have to zoom in to read your content

When your site STILL has two columns in the mobile version which makes me have to zoom in on your mobile version to read your content you have failed. Worst yet is when you make it two columns and THEN lock out the zoom function which makes me punch the wall pretending it’s your face.

You don’t have full RSS feeds and I have to click through to your non-mobile site because you don’t auto-choose the style sheet presented

I’ve deemed you worthy of my time by subscribing to your feed so that I can get each update on my own time in the browser/reader that I choose so that I don’t have to monkey around with everything that I’ve stated above on your below-par excuse for a website. Then you pull the “We want you to read it on our site and in order to see it you have to go here and wait for 20 hours for our flash ads to load because you HAVE to see them for us to get monies”. Fuck you. Unsubscribed.

Conclusion:

I don’t really punch the wall, but I do get frustrated. And I’m upping my policy. If you have a mobile site and you’ve obviously taken the lazy route to making it work then I’m not going to visit your site in any browser. Those of you that don’t have mobile sites yet, get one, but put a dash of love in it for me… I’ll appreciate it (and no doubt your other adoring fans will as well). For you bloggers out there, just make sure you’ve got a full content RSS feed enabled and I don’t care what your site looks like. Add ads into the content, don’t care, at least you won’t make me angry and I can still read about that thing you did with that guy and girl at a public place… GOING TO A CONCERT WITH YOUR FRIENDS… gosh, your mind went in the gutter fast, didn’t it.

I’m cleaning out the micro-SD card on my phone and I noticed a folder for Foursquare. When I opened it there were 344 .dat files in the folder totally 1.64MBs of space.

I’m not all that concerned with the fact that there were .dat files in the folder, what I am concerned about is the fact that they are most likely used for caching data, but not cleaned up.

I’m all for portability and convenience, but I wonder how much other crap is on here that doesn’t have good cleanup mechanisms around old files. Also, had I left it alone it probably would have approach epic levels of *gasp* 2MBs. After cleaning them up the application continue along, but this time a bit leaner.

Moral of the story: Be kind to your users. Clean up after yourself.

Yesterday I received a few emails from OneForty.com which is a directory of applications to use with Social Media sites.

I signed up for their email list because I wanted to receive updates from them when they added new features to the service, etc. However, I didn’t expect:

It’s not particularly a big deal because I work for a company that manages email lists and mailings through our CMS platform, but one thing that’s very clear is that part of the process got screwed up.

The content of the email was pretty much standard for testing a mailing. The lesson is that you should be only entering in test data to mailings that are either A) on a test server or B) assigned to a mailing list that only contains yourself or your coworkers.

I’m also going to assume that the reason that two emails were sent out was because the first one wasn’t received by the person testing.

While writing this I received a DM from Laura Fitton (CEO of OneForty) apologizing for the test emails but she mentioned that they didn’t send out an apology email because they didn’t want to further annoy with an apology email (good move in my opinion).

The lesson here is to check your setups before testing your platform if you have to work in a production environment.

Saw this strange captcha today.

What I have typed into the right side worked, but captcha’s are only supposed to have two words, not four.

I recently upgraded my Hulu account to Hulu Plus. I did this because my Roku player had a new channel for Hulu Plus. I rarely watch Hulu mostly because my main online streaming is done via my Roku box and up until now Hulu wasn’t a choice on there.

I’m happy with the choice in content for Hulu Plus and even though it will still serve me ads I’m ok with that due to the price point of $7.99 per month (basic cable serves me ads for $10.47 / month and I don’t complain about that).

What I’m not happy with, however, is the diminished quality of service that appears to be coming from the Hulu Plus player on the roku box. I remember when Hulu had just launched past it’s private beta and the service was a little bit rocky, but it was free and had content I couldn’t otherwise get. Now that I’m paying for this service the lack of quality and consistency is unacceptable. I wouldn’t continue paying for Netflix if it kept stopping due to network issues.

Here are the issues that I’m finding on Hulu Plus on the Roku player detailed in a support message I sent them:

I recently became a Hulu Plus subscriber and am still in my free week. Getting a response to this in a timely fashion is crucial to me going past the free week.

My issue is that the streaming on the roku player is extremely buggy right around commercial play times.

Either the playback of the show stops and I get the retry page or the show pauses for a minute or two only to come back in a fast forward fasion and then cuts directly to commercial. Once it comes back from commercial the problem continues for a minute or two and then repeats itself a minute or two before the next commercial break.

I’ve experienced this on both of my roku players in the house. Both are connected to wifi, but I’ve connected them both to a wired connection and experienced the same issues.

I don’t have any problems playing netflix or amazon movies on the highest quality offered by those services for the complete time of the show and streaming shows all day.

If you’ve got a Roku player and are thinking about get Hulu Plus with it, I’d wait until they have some of the bugs sussed out of the channel regarding playback issues. Especially since it seems to have everything to do with showing commercials, which is admittedly the worst part of the service. Even though I really like FedEx Loading Screen commercial because it made me yell at the TV:

Update: I was watching an episode of Reaper yesterday when the stream locked up my Roku box. After a few minutes the picture came back and displayed a few commercials. When the show came back it replayed the few minutes before the commercials and then stopped again at the same exact point. I left it running but after 10 minutes the show hadn’t started playing again.  I cancelled my Hulu-Plus this morning. I’ll wait for them to fix their issues or for something better.

The company I work for recently switched to the Agile SCRUM method of development. Not only that but the method for scheduling new work went into a process that supports Agile as well.

I’ve always tried to be a tester who makes sure I get full coverage on anything I’m testing but the question came into my mind today during a sprint review that maybe I’m creating too many test cases; too much attempted coverage.

After reviewing my test cases I found that I didn’t have any duplicate coverage on anything and the test cases were broken up and numerous to help support the automation initiative that is also in the building process.

The problem I see is that the majority of the tests that I’m creating are not viable to add to the automation/regression test list. I’m making sure that I get the individual acceptance cases tested for and the failure cases for those tested for. Throw in database testing, security testing, etc. Is the issue that I’m seeing of too much test planning and too much test writing time being spent?

I love covering everything possible, but if the majority of the cases that I’m creating aren’t able to be used in the automation or regression sets is it worth having all that extra?

I try to break a test case down (as you should) into one set of instructions with a specific end in it’s simplest form so that automation could consider grabbing and implementing that test case, but if I know a process isn’t going to be ported to the regression/automation set should I both breaking it down as much?

For those of you running in Agile environments do you find that the time you’re spending creating test plans for individual user stories cuts into the time that you have available to test too much? Are you running into the same issues that you did in waterfall that even if you have code that is being added and you have stuff to test are you still pushed for time at the end of the sprint? Are you pushing user stories to the next sprint because you didn’t have enough time to finish your testing?

Flickr Image Credit: Brymo “Overwhelmed”

Initial Thoughts

My first thoughts when receiving the Droid X was that the screen was HUGE. Not quite as big as the HTC Evo, but still a big screen. The body is relatively thin for it’s size but the side with the camera is a bit awkward due to it adding another 25% of thickness in that one specific area.

Form Factor

The phone has a mini-HDMI port for displaying videos and images on a compatible display which is a pretty decent feature for a phone that touts itself as a media device. There is also a red camera button on the same side as the volume buttons. During camera mode the volume buttons act as zoom buttons, but the zoom feature isn’t available during video recording. The video recoding itself is capable of recording up to 720p video. However because Gmail limits the size of attachments those without another email address on the phone will be unable to send those images via email.

Without the included 16GB SD card the phone has 8GB of internal storage. This is more than enough for anyone with itchy app download fingers.

The size of the phone itself fits decently for use with two hands, however it’s almost too tall and wide to be able to handle well with one hand. I got the opinion of 4 women as well and they all said the phone was just a bit too big to consider using on a regular basis (even for a purse phone). Also what was mentioned was that for one handed usage it’s impossible to touch the opposite side of the screen with your thumb.

Here are some images of the body of the phone (Click for the larger size): Flickr Set Link

Motorola Custom Software

I have so far not been impressed with any of the custom home screen overlays beyond the native android interface. I do like the fact that you can have up to 7 custom home screens. The tech specs on Motorola’s site say nine, but I can’t find any options to add more screens. During my initial use of the phone I had some issues with the video and regular camera custom applications. The video wouldn’t exit or respond to screen touches (it’s supposed to display the interface when you tap on the screen when you aren’t recording). Also, the camera got stuck in a weird orientation which I was only able to fix by removing the battery (A regular power off/on didn’t fix it).

The custom social networking application is relatively useful since you can add your Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, other email, other Gmail accounts to the phone and have a global address book. However without the right settings you’re soon stuck with a contact list that can easily reach over 1,000 contacts since there isn’t a smart-merge feature. My normal contact list has about 200 names/phone/addresses in it, but the people I follow on twitter is over 500. Add my 200 some Facebook friends and I’ve got a 900 person contact list. During setup I was asked if I wanted to merge all the contacts onto my main Gmail list. I’m glad I declined that option.

For the size of the phone and the amount of apps that it can run concurrently without slowing down the battery is pretty limited. I’m sitting at 50% power right now and it was fully charged when I turned it on this morning. This isn’t very normal since the screen has been set to auto-brightness (about 25% typically). The battery use monitor doesn’t take non-system applications into consideration like the battery use monitor on the myTouch 3G (Android 1.6). Granted I’ve been showing the phone off, taking a little video and have Wi-Fi on, but this phone wouldn’t make it out of the office and to a night out like the myTouch does for me (mine turns orange around 1am on a night out after a day of normal usage).

Video and Images

The media capabilities of this phone are very good. Pictures are snapped and stored quickly and it has a relatively fast shutter speed with good low light images that taking in a lower lit bar or room will not give you completely black images. The ability to keep the LED flash on during video recording is also nice, but you shouldn’t shine those lights in anyone’s face for too long since they are extremely intense. Also, battery power will likely suffer if used too much.

The 8MP images taken (see below) are nice when not viewed in larger size, but upon closer inspection show a lot of pixelation

Here are some images from the camera (Click for the larger size): Flickr Set Link

Final Thoughts

While I’m impressed with the overall ability of the phone to display images, video, and gaming; the phone almost seems too big. It rivals some digital cameras in height and width, but not overall image quality. However this is almost to be expected since the images used from the camera would almost certainly be viewed on a smaller screen, displayed as a smaller image on the web. They almost certainly wouldn’t be printed out onto anything bigger than an 8×10 (but that’d be pushing the quality).

It’s definitely a fast phone, but with the Motorola custom overlay the updates based off the Android version will be delayed from non-customized phones (Android 2.2 is out already but this is still running 2.1 and looks to be until late Summer).

Full Disclosure: I have been given a Verizon Droid X to tryout. The phone was enabled with a data plan, talk, and text messaging for which I am not being charged. I am receiving no other compensation for use of this phone or the reviews I write about it. I am not a current Verizon Customer and have not been offered any free phone service beyond what I get through trying out this phone.