Don't they have any good testers?

Ever been using a website and find yourself asking the question "Don't they have any good testers?". You'd think that in today's age where people almost always prefer to check out a company's website, or make travel plans etc. online and lo, behold - the website has issues.

I found myself interested to donate to a charity online and tried multiple times over the year to do it but apparently, it never goes through, and doesn't even inform the user (me) that it's failed.

I tried booking tickets on an airline's site using a Promo Code I had on email and it kept showing me a vague error and asking me to retry. I kept re-entering the data in different combinations hoping to see some results and then had to browse the entire website to find the elusive "Terms and Conditions" to realize the promo code could only be used within a certain date range.

Or even the most popular social network with it's "Recognized Devices" which apparently never remembers the device and I eventually had to disable the option.

Are these companies really thinking that all fluff with no stuff is going to keep getting ignored by the people.

I would volunteer to help rectify these websites, if only to have a session of web browsing where I don't have to ask "Don't they have any good testers?"

Back to blogsville..

Ok I haven't blogged in days -but am back today because the one thing happened for the first time which drove me up the wall.

Picture this - Person X approaches Lead Y with an idea to modify a document to make some changes that will be helpful. Lead Y says "Sure, do it.". Person X spends hours poring over it and finally completes and sends it. Lead Y replies "I got another one from someone else more value add and more productive. So we won't be needing yours". Person X smiles and says "Wow, Great".

Well, no guesses - I was Person X and I decided then and there to not even unconsciously attempting to join the brigade of "butter-up lead appraisal time".

But it's definitely in the air - everyone knows their fates (read salaries) are going to be decided in a few weeks so everyone is trying their best to make the lead happy.

Ahh, office during appraisal season - you think techies got it easy? You should experience it for a month and you'd know why they pay us so much to convince us we've got it good :)

Let's see what lies ahead - buttering is not something I do as well as my job :)!

Delete it again!!

Looks like they fixed it, interesting!!

Blogspot Bug - Known?

I had to start with this interesting bug I chanced upon in BlogSpot. Now my friend sent me the URL to her personal blog and the first thing I did was browse through her list for any interesting looking articles I could start with (didn't have the patience to browse it all - my bad). Anyway, I saw some and read through it and bookmarked her blogs. In fact, I logged in to BlogSpot and added her to my Reading List (from Blogger's Dashboard). When I browsed through the list of posts that appeared in the Items view, I saw some really intriguing titles with the first para it seemed - some which I didn't remember seeing when I browsed through the blog list.

Bit of background info- My friend is a lovely lady and one of my closest friends in college. She often would pen her thoughts at any given time - poems, stories, random thoughts everything. So if she got upset with anyone, chances are there was a piece of paper somewhere with all the not-so-pleasant details.

So my curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the name where I was disappointed with the "Page not found Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog <> does not exist." message. So I thought blogger was acting up and clicked on another title which intrigued me and there was the same message. Now this got to me, so obviously I browsed to her blog to check the list and confirmed that there was no such blog on her page, at least not anymore.

Later I pinged her on Gtalk and asked her about it and she was surprised - I told her I was a tester drawn to bugs (truth - I was lucky :)). Needless to say, she was not happy but what to do - blogger is not so reliable it seems.

So the next day, at work I logged into Google Reader for my half hour time of catching up on blogs I like. I suddenly remembered the BlogSpot bug so I added the same blog's URL again curious to see if the same thing happened. And guess what, this time I was able to see the entire article - Hurray for the bug (and my curiousity :)), yikes for someone new to blogging. Not sure, anyone would appreciate their deleted blogs being visible to others especially those who follow them (considering they deleted something with the anxiety that the subject of the blog might just see it).

I tried it on this blog and was not able to reproduce it again so it could be something they fixed for the newer blogs, anyway am keeping one test post on the blog for a few days to check again later. So advice to all bloggers out there who delete their older posts, save it to your blog first with all the "confidential" data removed and then delete it - better yet, just overwrite it - looks like nothing's quite hidden as it appears.

Cheers and Happy Testing!

P.S: If this is a known bug, well I just noticed it now. If not known, gimme a ping if you were able to notice the same.

Who am I?

Sheeba Elizabeth Ninan - tester - that's all for now :)