Computing Blog

A blog about all aspects of computing and technology from software development to social network to commentary on the IT industry as a whole.

The Colonel

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Tim Hall

The Daily WTF is always an amusing site for anyone involved in software development. Many of the stories are grisly coding horrors, but since I haven’t been a developer for many years, I find the best stories are the tales of project management trainwrecks. A reminder than no matter how bad the worst project you ever worked on, someone, somewhere has had it far worse.

This one, featuring “The Colonel” is a classic tale of how putting someone with no knowledge or understanding of how software is created can go horribly, horribly wrong.

The project started out on the wrong foot, with something that happens all-too-often with statups.

As for their problem: The Colonel and his sales team told prospects that the prototype was their core product, and managed to sell a handful of licenses for it … To ensure that programmers were focused on programming, The Colonel cut out a lot of the unnecessary parts of the software development process like system design and testing.

As the whole thing goes pear-shaped it shows the failure mode of authoritarian command-and-control management.

To no one’s surprise, the crackdown didn’t quite help morale or increase business in the least. It did lower expenses quite a bit; by the time this next email was sent out, twelve of the staff had resigned:

While The Colonel sounds like a textbook case of an ex-military type unable to cope with the civilian world, I can’t help feeling he would have been equally disastrous leading troops on the battlefield.

Posted in Testing & Software | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Facebook experiment has failed?

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Tim Hall

A Programmer’s Tale thinks the Facebook experiment has failed. The suggestion is that problem is Facebook’s emphasis on sharing rather than creating original content.

Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say. Here is a network that doesn’t care about originality or the quality of content. In the time it takes to create something original, they could share dozens of things.

There was a time when my feed was flooded with pictures which consisted of annoying platitudes superimposed on stock images and passive-aggressive someecards. Too many of these things originate from dodgy “like farms” run by spammers.

Inevitably, there is an entire industry working non-stop creating low quality, emotionally appealing content that gets ‘likes’ from gullible users.

Although looking at my own Facebook feed, the signal-to-noise ratio is nothing like as bad as described above. It may be that FB has improved their edgerank algorithm so that it no longer favours pictures over text the way it used to. Or it may simply be that I’ve unsubscribed from photos from a couple of dozen of the worst offenders for sharing low-quality content.

The conclusion is that we need to abandon Facebook in favour of returning to blogs and forums.

We need to go back to smaller communities. Where people aren’t lost in the mediocre averages of large networks. That’s where ideas flourish.

That’s one thing I don’t like about Facebook; the way it’s sucked the life out of other once thriving online communities. Whether it’s possible to go back to them, I don’t know. Many people say they appreciate the “one stop shop” approach of a social network rather than visiting dozens of different sites to check for new content.

The internet continues to evolved, and I’m beginning to think Facebook has peaked, and its day in the sun is over. What will replace it is anyone’s guess.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | 2 Comments

Assigning Priority to Bugs

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Tim Hall

A post about assigning priorities to bugs.

My current client uses an internal defect logging system rather than a proprietary tool. It doesn’t have separate “severity” and “priority” fields, instead we have two fields called “Priority” and “Internal Priority”. In practice testers no longer use the former at all, since all priorities bar the default are now reserved for issues raised by customers via the help desk. So testers use the latter as “our” priority to identify those bugs that need fixing urgently. It’s a numeric field which allows priorities from 1 to 999, although we don’t use anything like the full range.

Without getting into jargon-laden moon-language or buzzword-parody words like “Seriosity”, I’ve used the following two factors in assigning values to this when logging defects found during testing.

First take the importance of the feature in question, on a scale of one to three.

1 – Critical feature on the end-to-end life-cycle of the object under test
2 – Important but non-critical feature
3 – Minor or little-used feature

Note that I’m using “Feature” rather than “Function” here, and the definition of a feature is a level of granularity below the module it’s logged against. For example, a search module blowing up when you press “Go” would be a 1, but an advanced search criteria on the third tab not returning the correct rows might be a 2 or a 3.

Second, take the impact of the bug on the feature in question:

1 – Feature unusable with no workaround
2 – Workaround exists but significant inconvenience to the user
3 – More irritation than inconvenience

Then multiply the two figures together, and you get a figure from 1 to 9 (The numerically-literate among you will notice that you’ll never get 5,7 or 8), and assign that as the Internal Priority. So a critical feature that just doesn’t work at all will be Internal Priority 1, an inconvenience with a workaround on an important function will be 4, and so on.

It’s a bit quick-and-dirty. I know. But it works well enough, and is a little less subjective than “Think of a number between one and six”, and the product owner always has the option of raising or lowering it later.

What rules of thumb to you use for assigning priorities, severities, seriosities or whatever? Are testers even responsible for assigning priorities at the time of logging, or is the deferred to the product owner or a bug triage meeting?

Posted in Testing & Software | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Comment spam getting smarter?

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Tim Hall

If you run a blog, one of the maintenance chores is dealing with comment spam. They’re usually easy to recongise; either banal “This is a really informative post” or surreal bot-generated gibberish. This was a typical one from a few months back:

“What i do not realize is in reality how you’re no longer really much more well-preferred than you may be now. You are very intelligent. You understand therefore considerably when it comes to this topic, produced me personally consider it from numerous various angles. Its like women and men aren’t interested unless it��s something to accomplish with Lady gaga! Your personal stuffs great. Always take care of it up!”

This one, though, looked superficially convincing.

When I initially commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get several e-mails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove me from that service?

Now I do have the subscribe-to-comments plugin installed, and it’s not inconceiveable that something might have gone wrong with it. But it smelled a bit fishy, not least because I didn’t recognise the name.

First clue (which ought to have been obvious from the fact that the comment was held in the moderation queue in the first place) was that nobody using that email address had ever left a comment on this site. The second clue was that it was left against a several months old post that had no comments.

Once I looked at the subscribe-to-comments database, there was no sign of that address. So I concluded it was spam, and shot it.

Hats off, by the way, to Askimet, which traps hundreds of spam comments a week, leaving just two or three in an average week that need to be moderated manually. No way could I have open comments on this blog without it; it’s an absolutely critical part of the WordPress ecosystem.

Posted in Testing & Software | Tagged | Comments Off

The perils of relying too much on Facebook

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Tim Hall

A post on Hypebot about the perils of fake Facebook likes highlights some of the problems with Facebook as a means of bands promoting their music.

This situation reinforces the fact that musicians need to build their own home on the web and need to build their own mailing lists.

It’s also a reminder to me that, despite the fact that such points are raised in somewhat of a repetitive manner on sites like Hypebot, a lot of musicians just aren’t tuning in and just don’t get it. On a positive note, that means musicians that are in the know have an extra leg up in the game.

Ultimately a shift away from Facebook needs to occur. I see more and more people both in and outside of music discussing alternatives.

As Zuckerville has grown in popularity, more and more bands began using it as their main means of interacting with fans. With a larger potential audience there was some logic in the way a few bands I know of closed down their increasingly inactive forums in favour of interacting on Facebook. But I’ve seen too many bands neglecting their web presence altogether, to the extent that some bands didn’t bother with a web site at all, having Facebook as their sole net presence. I think this is dangerously short sighted.

The moment Facebook introduced pay-to-promote for posts ought to have been a wake-up call. Not only was it a classic bait-and-switch move, but it was the sort of thing a monopolist does once predatory pricing has put the competition out of business. Investing too heavily in one platform you don’t have any control over is a big risk.

It’s true that bands still can’t afford to ignore Facebook as long as it continues to remain as popular as it is. But there’s no excuse for any band not to have it’s own website and an old-fashioned mailing list. Yes, it might seem a bit old-school, but that way neither Mark Zuckerberg nor anyone else can then hold them to ransom by holding their only connection with fans hostage.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Great blog post from Mike Talks – Everything I know about Testing I learned from Doctor Who..

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Good blog post by Trish Koo on how it’s not just sexist men who put obstacles in the way of women in technology.

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

The Return of the Facebook Privacy Monster

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Tim Hall

I see the Facebook Privacy Monster is rearing its ugly head again with another subtle unannounced change. People need to understand that Facebook does not care about our privacy. All they care about is selling our data to advertisers. And they notoriously employ no testers, so whatever privacy options they do try to implement are always going to be riddled with holes.

The problem with Facebook is the way it aggregates all your postings and comments across posts, pages and groups, and you have no control over any comments left outside your own page. If you post to public groups or leave comments against public posts, Facebook will show them to all and sundry. If you’re concerned about privacy at all, you should not be posting things you wouldn’t want you mum, your boss or your ex to see anywhere on Facebook. Keep that sort of stuff for closed mailing lists, private forums, or places that allow anonymous pseudonyms.

I wonder if we should all go back to forums and blogs, where your postings on different sites weren’t connected and aggregated together in the same way, and none of them ever forced you to use your real names anyway.

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Bug Fixed

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Tim Hall

I’ve now fixed the bug on the Author page of this blog (Did any of you notice?), so it’s no longer giving a 404 error. It turned out that author names containing spaces didn’t work when the site was configured to use custom permalinks. After a bit of Googling, it turn out the fix is to update the table wp_users, changing the field user_nicename to get rid of the spaces (So it’s “Tim-Hall”, not “Tim Hall”).

For reasons best known to WordPress themselves, the user’s nicename isn’t editable though the WordPress control panel, so you have to update the database directly. I did it using phpMyAdmin which is available on my host.

Posted in Testing & Software | Tagged , | Comments Off

When you get the “Windows help” phone scam, you are supposed to put the phone next to the subwoofer and turn the volume up to Eleven, aren’t you?

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off