Here’s the scoop.
I’ve spent a large portion of my career as a software tester. I’ve tested control panels, military stuff, printers, drivers, portions of operating systems, old terminal communication devices, cell phones, network systems, you name it.
Then as I got more mid career AKA Older, my experience and knowledge became less valuable versus my salary and the cost of my group insurance plan. I’m pretty dang healthy, but because I’m over 50, corporate group health policies are pricy.
Don’t anyone bet on retirement. In America today, you can be laid off and never work again while you’re not quite old enough to actually retire but still too old to work in your field.
Even part time retail positions are few and far between for middle aged white men. I was turned down for a minimum wage gas station attendant position. Yeah, I was going to sit in a glass booth at 4 am selling smokes and making change. I’m either “Over qualified” or too dumb to do that job.
In any case I was laid off as were my co-workers, and haven’t been able to secure employment in my former career since.
Believe me I’m needed.
I have a canon printer. It’s a cute little thing and it works really well. It’s frugal on ink and I like it. I also have the Microsoft office suite. Without getting too technical, here’s the problem. If I print to the Canon printer using File—>Print and then click OK.
My little Canon printer takes off and prints pulling paper from the bottom try as I’ve asked it to do because I’ve set the bottom tray as the default tray. And I’m a happy camper, all is right with the world.
If, however I click on the little printer icon on the menu bar in Word,Excel, or Powerpoint which should just print the same document with default parameters, my little Canon fires up and tries to pull paper from the rear tray which, is alway empty and oh by the way, is not the default tray for paper.
In my opinion this is a BUG in either Word or the Canon printer driver. It’s a simple bug, and it’s an annoying one that should have been caught in the initial round of testing.
Grumble Grumble
I move on to my next task of the morning.
I need to Fax something to a business.
Part of that requires that I make a copy of a small card. Since the card is small and both sides will fit easily on one side of one sheet of paper I think, “I can use the memory of the copier to put both sides of the card onto one sheet of paper without having to waste two sheets of paper.”
Sure enough, there is a function called 2 sided original —> One page the icon shows something that looks like a business card and the icon for the One page shows the business card icon front and back printed on a single page.
That’s what I wanted, what I got was two pages 1 each with one side of my original insurance card. So I ended up wasting 3 sheets of paper instead of only 1 to get what I was shooting for.
Back in the day, for Xerox I tested a function that would take two sided originals and convert them to single sided originals and this function was smart. If the original was from an Auto Document Feeder (ADF) it behaved one way, if the user was lifting the cover and placing an original on the glass the function behaved in a different way.
The assumption was that the user has something special in mind, if they’re lifting the cover. Probably copying insurance cards, or library cards, or Drivers Licenses for inclusion in a file somewhere. Even from the ADF, the function could take 8.5×11 double sided originals and reduce them to fit side by side on a single 8.5×11 page.
Silly me! I thought my copier was using that function… it wasn’t!
Basically, the result I got was no different than if I’d placed the copy on the glass, pressed copy, THEN flipped the original on the glass and pressed copy again.
In other words, the super special little button was completely useless and should never have appeared on the screen at all.
This one looks like the kind of screw up you get when you have Indian developers and testers who misunderstand the specification and don’t bother to ask any questions.
Americans would have caught this, or at least questioned it. Provided they were literate enough to actually read the specification and understand it.
And here’s another bug. This one is in this very application.
See that line up there? It’s called a Horizontal Rule in HTML.
I just discovered if I end a line of text, then hit return and then add a horizontal rule, then hit <Return>
My typing insertion point loops back to the top of this blog entry instead of moving to the expected location… directly under the horizontal rule.
I’d have to check the HTML specification to see if that is correct behavior on a web page but this is a blog creation utility.
This is a minor thing, The Application MarsEdit works a lot more like a word processing program than an HTML creation tool. In addition, this application generally produces very nice HTML code. MarsEdit is one of the most reliable applications I use. I guess I should send them a bug report.
In the past they’ve been very receptive and they’ve also been really nice when what I thought was a defect in the software, was actually a defect in my reasoning.
In point of fact, I did send a bug report. Red-Sweater contacted me today asked for some detail and was able to reproduce what I’m seeing. They actually said, “Thank You”. They totally made my day.
They produce great products, are easy to deal with, and genuinely nice.
Red-Sweater deserves continued success and if you can swing business their way please do.
Then there’s this…
I used to be able to print a FAX job to my multifunction printer, (Fax, Copier, Scanner, Printer) directly from my computer. I could enter the phone number in the print dialog box and then say “FAX” instead of “PRINT”. The file went to the printer, it dialed the phone number, sent the FAX and told the computer “I’m done”. It was simple and efficient, Heck, I’d queue FAX jobs on my computer all day long then when I got home or back to the office my computer would find the FAX printer and start sending stuff from the day.
To the computer it doesn’t matter. It’s sending data and the receiving machine has the responsibility to deal with it.
I’ve always found the print as a fax function very useful, and it saves paper.
Sometime in the past year, that functionality has been removed from my computer. The Printer hasn’t changed, in fact the only thing that HAS changed is an update to the printer driver.
They didn’t even mention it in the driver release notes. And they didn’t remove the feature from my list of pull down options. It just stopped working.
As I went through the trouble shooting procedure on the manufacturers web site, they suggested that I remove and re-install the driver. Of course, the only driver available on their web site is the current one.
When I did that, the feature completely disappeared from the list of dropdown options!
Well, that’s one way to fix it, I’d have preferred to continue to be able to Fax without having to print something out with it’s cover sheet, manually dial the phone number on the FAX control panel in the printer, and then shred the document after I’ve faxed it.
If you attempt to download the previous drivers you’re directed to a page that politely tells you to download the current driver as the older version are no longer available.
This solution sure as heck will stop the phone calls to support.
It will also mean that I won’t be purchasing this manufacturer’s devices in the future.
Then there’s this little gem.
Typed an email to my attorney. He’s changed his email address. I’ve changed his email address in contacts, and deleted the old address.
SO why did Apple Mail present the OLD address instead of the NEW address that’s in the contact card?
Worse yet because I wasn’t paying attention I SENT my email to that old address and it never bounced back. So I’ve got some private information potentially floating around that I can’t call back and that didn’t bounce.
I checked the contact card again, and yep, it’s right but the address that Apple Mail displays is still wrong. And there’s another software bug.
For all you folks who were sniggering about my concerns over the FAX problems, NOW perhaps you see my logic.
FAX is still generally point to point communications and while yes, it can be intercepted, a one or two character error in the phone number means the data doesn’t get sent or leave your office.
The same cannot necessarily be said for information contained in an email. It can be intercepted, and it’s possible for your email to go to an unknown person within the same domain name.
Jsmith@gmail.com or Jsmoth@gmail.com Both could be valid, one could be a criminal. The typo is only one character different.
Just saying…
So this is my day, every day.
I’m just doing my thing, trying to use software and products as intended and I spend the day stumbling across defects, or odd behaviors that interrupt my ability to continue working and draw my attention to the system I’m working on.
This makes a major case for “Black Box Testing” because some of the things I stumble across would only be really noticed if someone was actually working with the products. Automated testing systems are only as good as the scripting (programming) that’s written to test the software being tested.
It’s the difference between asking the question “Did the engine start” and was the car drivable?
This ability to stumble across defects is at once my talent and my curse. Honestly some smart company should hire me to test their software, I’d feel useful and they’d have better software.
Apple? Microsoft? HP? Canon? … Hello? Anybody?
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