Friday, April 9, 2010

The Curses of the Web App Tester

sigh


If there are other are web testers out there they can probably feel my pain. Since I started in the roll 6 months ago I've lost count of the times I've gone to other websites and been greeted with errors like below. This one is from this very blog.



Now I know the first thing you're thinking is, why are you using IE8. Well that's because I have to for the product that I test. That and I was struck by the need to check out the blog in other browsers, you know to see if there was anything funky going on. This is probably the first curse of the Web App Tester.

The second is that debugging is always cranked up to the max, thus at least half of the pages that you view spew forth errors like the one here.

The third would have to be the wrong browser curse, you know, you're looking at a site and it doesn't work properly, some widget is missing didgets or its just downright manked. So you are forced to cycle through all your browsers till you find one that the site works properly on. Following this, the next time you go to the site, you will of course not remember any of this and go through the whole cycle again.

I do a few things to avoid these curses, all of my non-testing browsing is in Chrome, which for the most part works pretty well, except for booking flights (Virgin pay with Poli I'm looking at you) and internet banking (Ubank your interest rate is great, your website isn't) the main reason for this success is that as I test corporate website software I don't need to test in Chrome (although I still do a bit) and so I don't catch the stupid JS errors that abound through out the land.

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