When you start a new job, you can’t really work without a mental image of the job: “This is my role. This is what I should be doing and how I should be doing it.” But that image is about 90% wrong (yes, I made that number up), and you need to let go of it …
Category Archives: QA
Testing Information Architectures
Usability testing for your information architecture – before you code.
Do not Hire This Person: QA Edition
Written in collaboration with Efrat Wurzel Three things some testers say that should serve as a warning sign that you may not want to hire them: “I can’t understand a feature or start thinking about its tests until I use it”. Obviously there are some things that will click better when working with the feature. …
Recommended Reading: Code Injections Where you Least Expect Them
If you’re testing HTML5 mobile apps, you might want to read about code injections through the bar-code scanner, videos, Bluetooth and more.
UX Review: Emergency Measures
If you’re working on a product and have no particular understanding of UX, you can still do a basic UX review to stop the most obvious disasters. This will not be as good as getting a UX expert or experienced UX-QA to review the product, but it will be much better than nothing.
Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 6: The Secret Usefulness of Bad QAs
We’ve all worked with testers who were bad at their job; it was frustrating and felt like a giant waste of time and effort. But hold on to those bad testers: they’re more useful than you think.
Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 5: It’s not a Feature, it’s a Bug: Fixing Bugs Your Users Enjoy
Some bugs, even quite severe ones, can seem to your users like very nice features. Bugs that are likely to reach this status are those that make work smoother at the expense of security (for example, not enforcing part of the permissions mechanism), faster by letting users skip steps that should be mandatory (for example, …
QA: Need Help Finding UX Faults? Ask the Technical Writers
Technical writers have a very clear goal: explain the interface. That means they notice, instantly, when it’s inexplicable. If your interface is a confusing mess with overly-complicated procedures, buttons that make no sense, important options hidden in sub-menus and related options kept a mile apart, it’s not only hard to use – it’s hard to …
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Glossing Over the UX: Why Do so Many UX Bugs Get Past the QA?
Some bugs are a work of art. Consider a login page I encountered a few weeks ago. Two fields, one Submit button – so far so obvious. But above the button was the text “Do not press Enter to log in; use the Submit button”. I pressed Enter, of course: the page was refreshed and …
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Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 4: Testers Should Write the First Draft and Approve the Last Draft of Release Notes
You might say I learned this lesson as a technical writer, too.
