Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Fun, IT and Quality

A couple of days ago I had one of my epiphanies. (I’m not a genius so something probably just dawned on me ;-))

The question in my mind was “Why do we keep on producing such cr*p software that people just don’t like to use?“. I need to caveat that a little as I solely focus on bespoke development for larger organisations here.

There’s lots of rational reasons why this happens. Examples are:

  • Overly aggressive timelines
  • No well-defined quality criteria
  • Poorly understood requirements/no understanding of solution
  • Bad SDLC
  • Politics
  • People
  • Budget
  • …

But there’s one that I actually never thought of listing….. FUN.

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Thanks Steve

A little on the late side but I did want to do a post on thanking Steve Jobs and what he did for me personally.

I’ve wanted an Apple ever since the original Apple II. My first Mac I ever saw was actually an Apple Lisa at my fathers design department. They were using it for CAD with a whopping 5MB Winchester drive. But the world turned out a bit differently. I never got to having an Apple II or a Mac.

Only in 2004, when we immigrated to NZ did we shell out for a MacMini and enter Steve’s world. Today we own several Macs, have had many more, have iPhones, iPods and are 101% Apple followers. We’ve never looked back.

But what has that got to do with a testing?

As it turns out there is/was someone at Apple which had a relentless drive for quality and usability. Now as you can easily guess that person is/was Steve Jobs (still struggling with the was here!). This drive is pervasive in all Apple products.

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Our first Defect

So we had our first defect raised. On the Chrome browser the RSS link above right doesn’t seem to work and complains about a missing style sheet. I’ve tested it on IE8, FF4 and Safari and all work just fine. So I’ll just put this down to “Google….get that fixed!”  😉

So sorry guys, if you want the RSS on Chrome, use something else for now.

But apart from that can I say I just love the testing community!!! You actually get feedback. Feedback is the only and -in my opinion- best way to learn. As a tester it’s what we do. We just put our foot in it wherever we can. I try and train my skills wherever I am so I of use feedback buttons on websites and do report issues with software. And the amazing thing is, that it works. Things do get fixed and companies, OSS projects, web masters,… they do react and they gladly do so.

So if you’re out there and see something you don’t like. Don’t click to the next page. Complain, rant, feed back but remember always to be rational, explain in detail and state the context. You will see that it works and that you’ll have trained your skills.

Author: Oliver

Hello Test World!

Hello all to this new testing Blog of Aaron Hodder, Brian Osman, Oliver Erlewein and Richard Robinson. Some of us have our own testing blogs but the thought here is that, since we think along the same lines and together seem to pack more testing-punch, it is natural for us to meld our minds into one blog. Our hope it is that you will be the main beneficiary of this and we can help you reflect and learn new things as you progress in your testing career and the profession in general.

You will also see our twitter streams at the bottom and rhs of this blog so follow us to stay on top of things.

Since STANZ 2011 is on next week in Wellington we’re rushing a bit to get this blog out the door and start reflecting on what’s happening in the scene. So please check back regularly to see new stuff.