I don’t want to go repeating too much what is other articles and blogs, but I want to use some very useful definitions known when referring about quality.

One of the most important is “Quality is value to some person” that is attributed to Jerry Weinberg.

I will try to point out what I understand through that. At first looked like another quote passed over without having any meaning except the fact that is attributed to some known author.  But when you think about that it has a lot of meanings

It shows relativity of quality. Markus Gärtner  combined this with another quote as explained in his blog post. It shows even more relativity. But this raises some questions:

If you have an application that you don’t like developing that the client is needing, where is the quality? If the client doesn’t have all the details to request an implementation and still insists on that, is it maybe your fault that you couldn’t explain the situation?

Maybe for a top secret application you wouldn’t find sense for, but from the client perspective is a priority.

Quality transforms in value. Value represents usefulness. Quality is the slim difference sometimes when one product is chosen over another, except when marketing comes up, but then also is about the quality of something else.

There is an expanded version also “Quality is Value to some Person who Matters” (not sure by whom), in which there is better pointing. Because someone who performs the quality review tends to think from his own perspective, and not from the client’s perspective, the value drops.

If I study some product, its not enough to just validate with”Looks good for me”, but you need to ask your client what is its purpose, where it will be used, how, when…etc.

Quality its also a purpose in itself. Quality starts to have value in the moment that its considered that some product needs it. A plastic bottle in a trash can is not examined for quality usually because there is no need for it in most cases.

Quality is about perception. In marketing there are sayings like “A good salesman can even sell drinking water”.Sometimes people can just be convinced about something as easy as getting convinced about the opposite.

Context is important. Like a tool designed to create automated scripts is not useful to test some application, but its good to automate something else that is not a test. In the first case the quality of the tool is low, but in the second is higher.

Quality is seen as opposite to non-inferiority. Sometimes is a fast general look that decides if a product is good or bad.

The business management strategy Six Sigma defines quality as “Number of defects per million opportunities.”

Subir Chowdhury, the “Quality Prophet” (not named like that by me, but by Marshall Goldsmith in “Business Week”) says for example  this: “Quality combines people power and process power.”

Businessman and author Philip B. Crosby refers to quality as “Conformance to requirements“, although he treats in a separate way the problem that the requirements may not fully represent customer expectations.

For Joseph M. Juran,the evangelist for quality and quality management, it is “Fitness for use“, where fitness is defined by the customer.

Noriaki Kano, a very known consultant in the field, and others, present a two-dimensional model of quality: “must-be quality” and “attractive quality.” The former is near to “fitness for use” and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about. Supporters characterize this model more succinctly as: “Products and services that meet or exceed customers’ expectations.”

Robert Pirsig,philosopher and author, sees it as  “The result of care.”

Genichi Taguchi, known engineer and statistician, comes up with two definitions.First one is “Uniformity around a target value.” The idea is to lower the standard deviation in outcomes, and to keep the range of outcomes to a certain number of standard deviations, with rare exceptions. His second definition is “The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped.” This definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system.

Peter Drucker,management consultant and self-described “social ecologist”, affirms “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.”

W. Edwards Deming,statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant, is concentrating on “the efficient production of the quality that the market expects,”  and he linked quality and management: “Costs go down and productivity goes up as improvement of quality is accomplished by better management of design, engineering, testing and by improvement of processes.”

There is also the self-established institutes, for which always I am circumspect but I will post for reference purposes. ISO 9000: “Degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements.” The standard defines requirement as need or expectation. The American Society for Quality: “A subjective term for which each person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can have two meanings:a. The characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs; b. A product or service free of deficiencies.”

So there are different definitions by people that come from their experience, need and study of quality.

For the simple end user, a study of quality is not needed in order to validate simple products though. If you have difficulties or bugs, you will hate it and not use it. If you like it a lot you will bypass and not worry about smaller things.

I decided I change the main hosting for this website. Although GoDaddy is pretty good and has a lot to offer, being able to run my puzzles on it, it is terrible slow sometimes. I don’t like going from place to place, but I opted for Inmotionhosting, that had good reviews(I hope not only sponsored ones ).

Btw I got an interesting bug with Inmotionhosting when creating my account and using “testalways” as id. I received shortly an email with links and credentials for cpanel, ftp, etc…. But it didn’t work so I called support. It was very interesting to find out that using a username that starts with string “test” made the account not to be activated. I assume they use the live platform also for tests and they didn’t think someone else will use similar IDs. That was pretty cool.

An unpleasant surprise was that although they supported cgi (I use that for my scripts) they don’t have enabled Python Imaging Library (PIL) that I need so much for graphics. The alternative was of course to buy a very expensive option in Inmotionhosting and I don’t like that. So  I was sad but decided to merge together the GoDaddy and InmotionHosting (and see how will work), a reason being that you cannot expect a perfect hosting from no web-host except maybe for huge costly choices.

Both hosting services have great support at least.

I also need to optimize and organize the website for better access.

Having to keep the puzzles on GoDaddy, I had to make redirects to the old site which is now under a sub-domain. I hope it will be OK, although some scripts used by some users to automate gathering of data have to be changed or updated

If you use two web-hosts you can have other websites there and combine and not loose too much.

I think its much faster now and I will try to work on the css to make it more optimal.

Pdf link here

I thought of creating some spoof Test Magazine with some stuff that occurs and can occur in some of the organizations or generally in the testing world.
If someone finds this interesting please contact me, maybe we can release better editions.

The titles for this “edition” are:

Page 3:
…Friends of developers suggest testing is bad as a career
…Software company looking to duplicate current valuable employee by outsourcing

Page 4:
…”Just try and see if it works” motto of a testing team
…Some guru says there is something as best methodology in testing
…Small company decides there is no benefit in testing
…Testers forced to follow unfeasible procedures get comfort in browsing the internet

Page 5:
…Developer frustrated as being downgraded to testing
…Tester tries to get respect from dev by writing few lines of code
…Some non-interesting article on a blog presented over and over
…A group of testers agree on a new popular methodology

Page 6:
…A group of testers agree on a new popular methodology
…CEO decides to make visits in the remote branches
…Developer regains its self-esteem after passing near the testing team location
… Calm guy becomes arrogant when hears the word “tester”

Page 7:
…Developer who waste time thinks he is still better than a tester
…Young tester tells his friends he will become Test Team Leader
…Talkative guy that calls everyone stupid promoted as QA Team Leader
…Big boss hires incompetent friend as QA Manager

This is actually a long video of Dr. John Medina about the brain. Some small studies some comparisons, bla bla bla.

What I understood as relevant is that the brain needs a certain amount of aerobic exercise to function at best parameters regarding thought. So if you consider testing as a highly thinking activity this is good to take in consideration.

Of course we cannot plan everything that might be good for us, but some things are very critical. And in our “modern society” (I am not so sure if the world really evolved though) we need to replace natural activities in a more restricted mode. So exercise is not done anymore working in a mine or preparing for battle, but its more like going to gym for example.

The idea its that to ignite the brain not much is needed as exercise, but still something relevant has to be done.

There is this problem with scripting and non-scripting in testing.
So here is how I currently see this: we don’t need to avoid it, or use scripting extensively . Its like ice and fire: too cold hurts, too hot hurts(also).
I have been in organizations that tend to use huge amount of scripting and some actually refused scripting totally(Yes it’s true).
Why is it that there are some approaches that involve scripting in 100%? Well my opinion is that is caused by people who work as testers but don’t try to study testing. How did I arrived to this conclusion?

In most of the cases there are testers who work as a testers, and everything stops there. Now this category splits itself in two parts: a)unskilled, and here scripting lacks also and b) people who write scripts.
This is created by the lack of understanding of people who hire:”Let’s hire someone to check all the time that this stuff is working”/”I am more confident, I have more good reports if everything is done automatically, and there is no other way here”.
Unskilled testers usually don’t try to improve, maybe because they first saw the job very easy. Then not so many opportunities seemed to arrive. And if they learned scripting they went for development. They don’t try to improve in other areas also. So at the end, the image in the people’s minds that decide the approach in testing, is scripting.
There are also other causes: scripting forces to go in detail, forces to think. This works very good while use with exploratory testing. But when scripting takes all the time, its easy to miss important points, system component interaction, people are tired etc.
And there is another problem: If you are not experienced with scripting enough to know its downsize, you tend to learn or point to others that scripting is the only way. This happens to young inexperienced testers(like I was some years ago. I have still much to learn though). The same effect is also for the people who come from development and are more comfortable with some code around.
The conclusion is that extensive scripting in testing is because of so many testers that don’t try to improve their skill.