Schedule and Events



March 26-29, 2012, Software Test Professionals Conference, New Orleans
July, 14-15, 2012 - Test Coach Camp, San Jose, California
July, 16-18, 2012 - Conference for the Association for Software Testing (CAST 2012), San Jose, California
August 2012+ - At Liberty; available. Contact me by email: Matt.Heusser@gmail.com

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Life is production issues

I do want to explore quality, and uncertainty, and ROI.

For that matter, here's a story I'd like to explore: On November 7th, we ate at Pizza Hut, and I had a problem with the boneless wings, in that they did not have any sauce on them.

That's right: Regular Buffalo wings have sauce; Boneless Buffalo Wings do not. They are like Chicken Nuggets - they have a breading. When I asked for sauce, the waitress said that this was not a "Wing Street" Pizza Hut, and they did not have sauce on the boneless wings.

That's right, according to this waitress, if you order boneless wings, you get something different things depending on which type of Pizza Hut you are in.

My offense was that these were "buffalo wings", and what made them such was buffalo sauce ... which these nuggets were not actually cooked in ... you get the point.

Yesterday, I tried to complain on PizzaHut.com and found that the complaint form was broken. To the tune of, when you click you get the complaint form, you get "error in / application."

I tried again today, got the form, filled in in exhaustive detail, and when I click submit ... nothing happens. It's possible something was transferred back to the server, but my form stays the same. No email that they got the message, nothing.

Looking around the website for a contact us brings me back to ... a form to fill out and send. No email address. No phone number.

Either these people are deliberately not interested in negative feedback, or they are in desperate need of a software tester. Probably both.

I remain unsatisfied. I may blog more on this after the American Holiday.

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In other news:

There has been some interesting discussion lately on the agile-testing list, about if "good enough" software is something to strive for, or if we should strive for perfection. I won't rant on that right now (You can Google "Impossibility of Complete Testing" if you'd like, or just go buy Jerry Weinberg's new book Perfect Software and Other Illusions.)

Still, I will leave you with one little rule I use for software testing:

Heusser's Postulate: The better tester you are, the more test ideas you'll have, but you get no more time. So testing quickly becomes an exercise in risk management.

1 comment:

Jesper L. Ottosen said...

Corrolary to Heusser's Postulate:
"Testing is an exercise in risk management"
:-)