Many of our users notice how simple Testuff is to use, that you really don’t need to read the Testuff help section to wrap your brain around it. We love it and are always on the look out how to make things even simpler especially if we get to try out cool new and intuitive design patterns.

Sometimes however usability goes wrong. Take a look at this screenshot and immediately answer the following questions: Which links have already been visited?

The immediate answer will probably be the gray links, right? Wrong! It’s the black ones I’ve already visited.

Why did you think this way? Probably because you associated the gray color with disabled controls in software, generally with old stuff, with the past. The black, in this context at least, looks like the shiny new fresh from the print links.

This is actually quite an embarassement for a website about design, but that’s life, and even Testuff has bugs I understand that they wanted colors to fit the website color scheme, and even though black is generally a bad color for links a reversal of the link visited/unvisited colors could do the site well. The interviews on that page are fascinating though!

Everything seemed OK. I even tested a modified version of the script to check the email comes out correctly by sending it to myself, and did find some bugs. But lacking a more “real world” test, say an example DB with the names and emails of everyone in Testuff, turned out I had a rather silly and annoying bug.

After I activated the script for real, I got back an email from a semi-angry customer who said that good support starts with getting the customer name right. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about until I saw the email that he forwarded me. It started with Hi Chris which wasn’t his name. In the words of the great Homer Simpson: D’oh!

Turns out the following line of Python code was wrong:

postsaleText = postsaleText.replace(textToReplace, firstName)

As you may understand, in the post sale email template I had some sort of fixed text, in this case Hi FIRST_NAME, that was to be replaced with the first name of each customer in a loop. However, with the above buggy line after the first time it was replaced FIRST_NAME was gone and instead Chris, the first name of the first customer that came up in the loop, was pasted in. After that the replace function is useless since it will never find FIRST_NAME again. Thus everyone received a mail that starts with Hi Chris, which wasn’t their name, except for Chris of course.

Here’s the correct line, with the additional fix of replacing postsaleText later on with newPostsaleText in the relevant lines:

newPostsaleText = postsaleText.replace(textToReplace, firstName)

This goes to show that developers just shouldn’t test their own code. They assume things work and fail to see their own blind spots. It takes another pair of eyes connected to some other brain to find these faults. Even a simple piece of code (the script just has 171 lines) has bugs, and despite my own QA experience I wasn’t able to find all of them, blind to my own blind spots.

Another conclusion is that “real world” testing is really important. If you want to find actual bugs that your actual customers may encounter, you need to use actual data for testing instead of a sterile environment. The headaches of setting up a real world environment will save much bigger headaches later, the kind you get when nasty bugs are discovered by your users and cost your company lot’s of dineros.

I’ve seen people asking lately if software companies actually need QA, if it’s not all a big waste of money. Your developers, as good as they may be, write bugs in their software. They can’t find their own bugs. Even if they go testing each other’s code, they don’t have the kind of software breaking thinking & skills that QA do and just won’t find as many bugs. Not to mention developers are usually further removed from the user experience while QA are much closer to it, thus finding “trivial” bugs that developers may ignore altogether, or worse, bugs in the software design.

So, if you’re OK with buggy software that customers will simply abandon in favor of the competition, if you wanna save a few salaries and you don’t mind losing market revenue, go ahead, make my day.

My Hollywood Twin, Johnny Depp, only looks like himself by 76%. That sucks for the algorithm developers. On the other hand, this guy has a hundred different faces in a hundred different roles, so what’s the wonder he doesn’t completely look like himself. One could also get a little philosophical and ask what it even means to look like yourself. Both Buddha and Heraclitus have said thousands of years ago that there is no permanence. If the cells in my body die and new cells are constantly born, why should I even look like myself by 100%?

Apparently Scarlett Johansson doesn’t even look like herself as a top match, but more like Lara Flynnn Boyle. Lost twins, or just hot babes? You may be the judge:

However, if there is once constant in the world where you can’t enter the same river twice and not even once, it’s the beloved Arnold Schwarzenegger with the well sculpted face of iron:

And who looks the most like a chimp? Jet Lee, Albert Einstein, and apparently also the late Yitzhak Rabin:

Last but not least, if you want to make another remake for the film Frankenstein, save yourself the heavy costs of makeup and special fx by hiring David Beckham as the lead role:

Found any funny bugs or had an idea for an interesting test for some web app out there? Share it with us in the comments!