Everyone’s a tester

This afternoon, my wife (who is a Dentist) was looking for information on the BDA (British Dental Association) website (www.bda.org) . She called me over when she realised that somebody working on that site didn’t seem to know their own domain name. One of the links to previous articles sent users to www.bda.org.uk (The British Deaf Association).

Doing the responsible thing, she laughed about the problem and sent a bug report (in the form of an email) to the BDA. They’ve promised to fix the problem, so no harm done (apart from some slight reputational damage).

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This brings one thing to mind for me….

If you want to avoid this kind of embarrassing incident, you should employ “real testers” to find these sorts of bugs before your customers do.

LinkedIn discussion groups….

 

I just stumbled across another LinkedIn discussion where a group of offshore testers were trying to explain to each other the difference between “throughput” and “response time”.  Their explanations and counter explanations run to several pages.  I scanned through the names and (offshore) companies involved and I’m glad that none of them are on my payroll. 🙂

 

 

It reminded me of the article that I wrote in December for the Trust IV blog recently. “Caveat emptor when selecting an offshore partner”. I’ve attached a PDF transcript of the discussion for those of you don’t have the dubious honour of being a member of the “Performance Tuning Tips” group on LinkedIn.
Is it any wonder that businesses undervalue performance testing when it’s conducted by people who obtain all of their knowledge from LinkedIn and GoogleGroups?

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Download LinkedIn Discussion Transcript