I hit Dice.com to check out the local job market action, but instead of letting me go about my bidness, immediately the home page asks me to take a poll wherein I could win a Kindle. All the better for reading a $.99 copy of John Donnelly’s Gold, I think, so I click through to it.

And then I get to this particular bit of logical Möbius strip:

To clarify: The control is labeled What did you accomplish on Dice.com today? (Select all that apply)

However, not one of the checkboxes is labeled None of these.

So to continue to the next step, if you want to continue, you must lie. And remember, the entrance to this quiz is on page load of Dice.com. That is, before you have accomplished anything at all.

Me, I didn’t lie: I eventually checked Other and Specified I got a blog post out of it.

What’s the lesson here, lads and lasses? Read the labels of the controls you’re checking, and make sure they make sense and make sure any enforcement rules upon them make sense vis-à-vis that label text.

So I installed the new full CD version of Intuit QuickBooks, which is adware designed to get you to buy a lot of Intuit additional services disguised as accounting software. Now, if you’re like me, you’re not into the intricacies of actual accounting nor the myriad business rules that the various state and Federal governments change upon a whim, but you rely on software and a good accountant (or, sometimes, an accountant, although I’d like to add my current accountant is a good accountant unlike previous engagements who continue to bill me a small amount every year for simply having my address in their files).

Where was I? Oh, yes. I was talking about trusting your application, particularly one with complicated rules whose violation might result in a prison sentence. You want to trust that application, don’t you? So do I.

But I get the software installed and get into the mandatory registration (that is, give us personal information so we can target more in-application advertising pop-ups to you), and I get confronted with obvious slops on the design.

To whit:

A couple missing lines and slurred text, probably caused by poor compression or sizing.

Next up:

A stray bracket in the corner.

Man, oh man, I can’t wait to find out what strange punctuation marks it leaves in my figures.

Do I trust the application? Not so much. Which is why I don’t use it for much more than a glorified check register. And if it continues with its unrepentant, unrelenting barrage of “Collect credit cards with Intuit!”, “Print checks with Intuit!”, “Let Intuit have access to all your financial accounts!” banners popping up before I can pay my bills, I won’t have to trust it in the future, as I move to Microsoft Excel where it’s nice and quiet.

Over at Forbes.com, Susannah Breslin posts This Is Why Your Employees Hate You.

Basically, here three order list points boil down to 1)You’re hired into a new company and don’t get the lay of the land before you start making a mess, 2) You’re unlikeable, and 3) You are not a leader.

As you might know, I think #1 is very important, and I’ve harped on it on occasion here. When you’re hired in as a manager, you have (or have convinced someone that you have) skill and ideas applicable to leading people in doing whatever you’re managing. You might have led a team in some other industry doing something similar, or you might even have been working within the same industry for a competitor or some related organization. Be that as it may, you don’t know how things are done in your new organization, and until you do, you should probably avoid upsetting the apple cart with your new ideas and processes which are really only old ideas and processes that might have worked at your last employer. At your new posting, some things are done that way because they’ve always been done that way, but some things are done that way because they work for your new employer and new employees. Until you can tell them apart, you don’t know where your new ideas are improvements or impediments.

As to number 2, remember, lads and lasses, there’s a fine line between being a jerk and being confident and right. Regardless of which side of that line you’re on, people who don’t like you or what you’re saying will think and say you’re a jerk. So be professional, but be confident and tell people the hard truths. Clearly. Dare I say, bluntly? I DARE.

And for number 3, we’ve seen QA managers like this, haven’t we? Just glad to be sitting at the big table and unafraid to rock the boat. You’re not going to add anything dodging that responsibility, and when it comes time to trim budget, if nobody remembers you saying anything about anything, especially not saying anything that stuck up for anything, they’re going to wonder why you’re on the payroll in the first place.

So do what Ms. Breslin says. Or the opposite of what she says. You’ll be a better manager for it.

But know these are not the reasons QA hates you. QA hates you because QA hates everybody.

You know, when this blog first started, I used to noodle around existing Web sites, find errors on their Web forms, and do some commentary on them. I haven’t been in that habit for a while, so you might think the quality of applications in the wild has improved. Oh, but no.

Take the Progressive Insurance contact us form:

Now, if you don’t select a topic before you click Submit, it asks for a topic. But only a topic

When you select a topic, it changes the fields on the form to reflect what they want for that kind of inquiry (enquiry for our R.P. friends). If you click Submit then, it shows you a list of the fields you need to fill out:

But if you click the Reset button to reset the form, well, that’s not cricket (cricket for our R.P. friends):

You know, any time your form changes the controls on the screen due to AJAX or other techniques, it’s a different form. And it never hurts to check your reset button in various forms of filling out the form, especially if there are look-ups or state changes as you fill out the form.

UPDATE: Welcome, Progressive Insurance readers!

Madhouse “6″. From before many of you kids were born.

Here’s the heartwarming story of an advertising agency that was on top of the world five years ago, but isn’t any more: The King’s Comeuppance: How the hottest ad agency of the aughts fell from grace.

Key paragraph:

“They’re much more important than the client, in their minds,” says Peter De Lorenzo, editor in chief of the car commentary site AutoExtremist.com. “They make ads to amuse themselves.”

Holy cats, that’s a bunch of people in software development, too, ainna?

Another week, another war. Or at least another heroic sacrificial holding action.

“Wars” by Hurt.

The guy doesn’t build UIs, but he does use them. And he doesn’t like some elements of them.

I don’t normally work in the UX/UI design world, but I know enough from constantly filling out web forms that too many designs out there are destined for a special ring of data Hell. If you’ve followed any of my web form rants on Twitter, you may have heard this before…but it should be repeated.

Go learn his list of peccadilloes and think about your own. Then, bother your designers and developers when they do something convenient for themselves once, but annoying to users thousands of times.

(Thanks to gimlet for the link.)

The application could handle it. The business behind the application? Not so much.

You need to be careful about what you promise—especially when you make a promise on social media.

This adage is ringing loud and clear for Toronto-based Timothy’s Coffee. In an effort last month to grow its Facebook fan base, the company ran a promotion saying that anyone who “liked” its page would receive four free 24-pack boxes of single-serve coffee. As the Toronto Star reports, this was rather generous, as these boxes retail for over $17 CAD each.

A contest aggregating site picked up the promotion and, as you can imagine, responses poured in, reports the Star. Problem is, the stock of product was depleted within three days of the launch, yet Timothy’s still sent emails telling people their coffee was on the way.

The best part? This is an EPIC WIN! for Timothy’s Coffee’s interactive agency, since a promotion so successful that it makes headlines is AWESOME! It’ll be in all the presentations from here on out.

As always, you have to remember that the little numbers on the screen match up with numbers somewhere else in real life. And your application can be one hundred percent consistent with itself, but if its business rules and limits do not align with the real life it represents, it’s a worthless application.

(Link seen via tweet, but I forget whose. Sorry.)

Find some of my other work elsewhere on the Web:

“Trouble Tickets Are Your Business” in ST & QA Magazine.

Book recommendations in The Testing Circus.

Here’s a little music for the meeting where you unveil the product to the client, and they get that stricken look on their faces because they don’t remember asking or signing off on that.

“Everything” by Divine Sorrow.

You might know, if you’re in the United States, have health insurance, and have an insurer that uses Express Scripts for its prescription benefits management, that as of January 1, 2012, the Walgreens pharmacy chain and Express Scripts contract ended. Which means that your insurance card does not work at Walgreens, and if you want our pharmaceuticals at reduced rates, you have to transfer your prescriptions to other pharmacies.

How many prescriptions are affected?

90,000,000:

An Express Scripts spokesman say their customers previously filled 90 million prescriptions at Walgreens. Now they’re taking them elsewhere.

It’s my understanding that the Express Scripts processing system was down all day on January 11. Is it related? I don’t know.

But I do wonder whether Express Scripts load tested its system to handle 90,000,000 change orders in a matter of days while handling its normal processing for all other normal maintenance.

It could be a valuable lesson anyway: Even after you’ve load tested your application to the limits of your budget for virtual users or to a level where the stakeholders are comfortable with very gradual ramp up times, sometimes events out of IT’s control could lead to a catastrophic meltdown.

There is a Unicode character and an HTML character for the skull and crossbones.

Please work it into your testing accordingly.

The software development community has an axis of partisans that runs from those who want to view themselves either as free-wheeling creative types channeling form out of the aether and putting it beautifully, elegantly into code to those who view themselves as white-suited scientists or engineers reasoning natural laws and applying those laws to GUIs. Hence, we get a constant stream of articles like this one, “Software engineering: Art or science?” from the November 8, 2011, SD Times magazine. November 8? Jeez, how deep is the pile of things on the left wing of my desk?

Point of order, Mr. Chairman: Software development is neither art nor science.

Were it art, the product would be meaningful only in invoking thought or providing a comforting sense of beauty. I mean, you don’t use a painting or a concerto for something other than enjoying the painting or concerto. Unless you’re breaking prisoners of war with them or something.

Were it science, the product could be replicated over and over again by others in other organizations and come up with the exact same result. I’m not talking about duplicating CDs or packaging distros; I mean when one wanted to connect to a database, one would use the proven method that had been established, basically, by Isaac Newton. Software development is not that way; its experiments–that is, the development of individual projects or products–do not yield a similar result when done over a series of time and in different location.

What is software development, then? It is handicrafts.

• The end product does something. The end of the coding process is not some pretty Matrix-drizzle of green numbers to make everything pretty. The end of the coding process is some sort of tool. Ergo, the application is not a work of art. While crafting often produces just art, in other cases it produces something that does something else, however twee. Quilting produces a device that retains heat; woodworking produces furniture. And so on.
   
• The end product is unique. Assuming you’ve built a phonebook database, a Web site that allows users to enter into a sweepstakes, or a Web service that seeks and receives data from a database to dish to a presentation layer somewhere, you’ve built something different from all the others that have been built before, even those that do the exact same thing. If this were science, your process would yield a finished result that matched the others.
   
• The end product bears certain trademarks of the craftsmen. Come on, your fingerprints and foibles are all over your software. The tweaks and ways you do things are different from everyone else’s, and someone who’s familiar with your work and with the industry will see your marks on what you’ve done.
   
• Each end product will have unique defects. In handicrafting, it might be a little glue showing in the gaps of bonded surfaces, maybe a little nesting somewhere in a seam. Maybe they won’t be glaringly obvious, and only another craftsman will see them. Maybe they’re obvious enough that nobody will buy them from your table in the bazaar. Regardless, the defects will be unique to the product, and your other products even if they’re very similar products will have different defects. Or maybe you make the same mistakes over and over and your defects are your trademark.
   
• Best practices and technologies are faddish. The things you’re coding in and the ways you’re doing it are not necessarily the end result of some evolution or even rational processes. They might just be what someone read in a magazine and thought would be worth a try. Evaluating the practices’ effectiveness might become secondary to trying something novel. I know how to paint the glass into which I pour my candles–what if I try etching the glass? What, indeed?
   
• Truth does not determine what tools or technologies you use. You know, for that pyrography design, perhaps a wire nib is called for. However, your budget only allows enough for a cheap Walnut Hollow solid nib woodburning kit. As in software development, sometimes the “best” tool is the open-source product that meets some subset of your needs, but it’s free. So you make do. Like a scientist working with studying particles with a Moderately Sized Hadron Collider.
   
• The craftsmen are more like gossipy ladies at the Singer sewing classes than steely-eyed doctors. I mean, granted, even steely-eyed scientists can be a gossipy lot, but. Any time your craftsmen speak from authority, they’re speaking from some experience, some faddish magazine or blog articles, and/or some education, but they’re not as ex cathedra as they’d like you to think.

Does the metaphor break down? Assuredly. I am a mere craftsman. But if you try to pour software development into some metaphor to make it comprehensible to non-IT people, you could do worse. Like saying it’s an art or a science.

If you work with credit card processing, this graphic will explain how the credit card is derived.

You can use it to better create test data or whatnot.

Today might be your last chance.

Personally, I’m logging a defect about a potential boundary issue: “Your life is short as hell”? I am no theologian, but I understand hell was considered eternal. Unlike life.

As a consultant, I feel this way sometimes:

I love giving advice. I write blogs, articles and a newsletter. I host a radio show. I tweet, Facebook and share nuggets of advice almost daily. So what is it in all of that, that would make anyone think they can still have the right to “pick my brain”?

I can’t tell you how flattering it is to be approached by representatives from major companies seeking my wisdom and advice. It shows they are listening, and like what I have to say.

But often I find the road ends when they are just on a fact finding mission. That mission is to pick my brain to gather as much free intel and knowledge they need to make their jobs easier.

Usually I get that feeling when someone says Hey, can you look at this Web site real quick for me? or Hey, what’s the best tool to use for this task?

Which happens. More often than someone wants to throw money at me to do it, sadly.

(Link seen here.)

It would be a facile take on this short motivational book to try to explain that QA should look at everything in this book and to do the opposite. This book is all about jumping into a project of some sort and how to best thwart the resistance that will come up when you try to complete it. The book focuses on creating a work of art, a book, a musical compostion, or whatnot.

Unfortunately, in the hands of an evangelist or a developer, he or she will think computer software falls directly into this realm, but it does not.

The tenets of the book include to slop out something before overthinking or before rational thought (seriously) overtakes you. How often have we seen software written like that? Every day? Several times a day? When we sleep fitfully because developers are effectively quashing resistance (that is, anyone who would say that it’s not good enough. Like us.) Begin before you’re ready. Get to work, so to speak.

While that might work for a symphony where the trumpet player blowing a flat note because there’s a misprint on the score won’t bother anyone but the purists or where a typo in a novel is going to cause a little tittering amongst the grammatically aware crowd but won’t derail the narrative, probably. But computer software is not like these things. Computer software, at best, is more akin to nonfiction than a sonnet. Mistakes will impact users in more than superficial ways.

Sure, the book does nod that sometimes you have to evaluate what you’ve learned to correct what you’ve done, but the main impetus of the book is charging recklessly forward. Kind of like when they promise to get some bug fixes into the next sprint, but at the next sprint planning meeting, they are eager to slop new feature out before overthinking or before rational thought overtakes them so that they’re always getting to work and not fixing stuff that’s broken.

I think the book probably does capture the creative mindset and motivates it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily mean that something of quality will result. But if you read it, maybe it’ll get you started on some project you’ve put off, or maybe it will just give you some resistance to the first-to-market-users-will-forgive mindset that leads to something like Circle more often than it leads to something like Microsoft.

Don’t you read it and go all soft on me now, QA professionals.

And before you ask, yes, this was given to me by a developer.

Books mentioned in this review:

Because I think I need some more Aries on my team.

The project manager’s wall clock:

The QAHY Shop sold a pile of them last quarter.

If I were making any money on them, I’d have made some money.