Test Culture Episode 1. The 101 Unit Testing Guide For Busy Managers.

So you want to install a test culture in your team/department ?

Maybe you’ve already done a great deal  by appointing a Test Supervisor that checks every aspect of the finished product. That’s terrific. Congratulations.

But there are still bugs ?  Your team is telling you that this little change you asked took the all system down ? How comes ?

Continue reading “Test Culture Episode 1. The 101 Unit Testing Guide For Busy Managers.”

How to finish 4 books in 2 weeks without reading !

Still on my frenetic audio book sprint I finished in 2 weeks :

  • Crucial Conversations
  • Made to Stick
  • The Goal
  • The 7-Habits Of Hightly Effective People


Actually with this method you can rapidely be overwhelmed. You shall :

  • Only listen in your car (I listen while shaving and dish washing but it’s to much.)
  • Slow down some times by not listening for one day. Just taking time to think.
  • Review it by writing a small article on each book. Even if somebody else did it.
  • Use a spreadsheet or any other mean to keep track of what you read. Otherwise you will loose sense of priority. In my Excel page for the Personal MBA I also put price of the books, and rate my desire to read them from 0 to 3. Then I can sort to determine what will be my next reading/listening.
  • Read a book in parallel (fiction is a good idea to breathe a little).

I apply only  a few of this tips for the moments. But writing them today helps me realize what I should do.

I’m listening to Pamela Slim’s” Escape from cubicle nation”. And I’m reading “Strength finder 2.0”.

And you ? What are you listening ? If you are following the PMBA program, what is you strategy ? Do you read by price/availability or just in random order or by category ? I’m really curious about it.

 

PMBA Going on…in my ears

I’m currently reading 10 Days to Faster Reading. It’s great to see improvement while reading. A stopwatch is needed, so I can’t read exactly when I want.

The moments where I have time to read is actualy : in my car, while shaving, while cleaning dishes… That’s when I can’t hold a book, but when my mind is free and I’m alone. The two essential condition to me for reading.

This is why I decided to listen to the books of the PMBA list (at least those I can find in audio form).

So far I’ve listened to :

Out of the PMBA I also listened to

  • “Cult Holmes” (funny for a fan of Sherlock Holmes like me)
  • “How to get anyone to do anything” (not so good).

Today I began Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.

That’s magic. 5 books in 3 weeks ! And I’ll never be bored again in traffic jams.

Of course I still love to read the normal way. I will finish “faster reading” to be able to continue without distractions. I received “Strenght finder 2.0” wich I’m eager to read too.

And you ? What do you read ? Do you listen to books ? When is the most favorable time to read for you ?

I’ve done goofed by koreanair.com

The other day I tried to buy a ticket on koreanair.com. I had to try 31 times to achieve the transaction.

Here are the ordeal I encountered.

E.T. go home

First of all : the Home page. Or should I say : one of the numerous home pages. There are so many ! Home page when you are logged, home page to select your country (which should be automatically detected, come on in 2010 !), home page in Korean when you encounter an error ! Great.

You must put one and only one page in you site you Korean Air people. And please, don’t use 2 home pages with just 2 pixels and a combo of difference.

Don’t follow the link, it’s broken

Maybe you would say : “OK, I’ll copy/paste the url and try to put it in Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari or Chrome or Opera.” Fail ! Copy/paste does not give you a valid URL. It seems to be randomly generated to put you back on the one of the home pages.

Hey ! This text is an image !

Some buttons and some texts are images ! So if they are not translated from Korean, you have a chance it stays in korean even if the page is in english. Texts are horrible but it seems like korean websites use them an awful lot to create pixel-precise pages. Go away you semantic web, we don’t need you !

Unstable environment

One of the thing you don’t want to happen when your are manipulating real plane tickets with real money is server errors. This is what happens. Is my money transfered ? Are my tickets issued . No way to say because :

We don’t need no feedback

This is true, I don’t like to know if my transaction worked, if my credit card number if securely transmitted. I don’t care ! I prefer pink heart floating away.

I’m a little harsh with them : there are informations. Many, many informations. But not the one I need !

Fake-support-girl

At the end of a lost request please meet Useless-Support-Girl. She will be very pleased to tell you the phone number you cannot call to have no information.

Back to the future

If you try to print the source code of some pages, you will see code comment dated of 2002. Wow, was it HTML 1 or HTML 1.8 at the time ? Don’t look for AJAX. This little snobbish way of doing so-called modern-pages. It’s outdated in 2002. Or at least, not invented yet maybe.

Frames and tables

Yes, here they are. Many of them. Frames to avoid loading pages and tables to put stuff in rows. Yes, because CSS is so modern. It won’t be compatible.

Pop it up !

One great things about browser is ad blocking extensions and serial popups blocker. Koreanair.com uses popups to inform you about crucial stuff. Bummer. Please turn off this horrible feature. And you will be able to nearly try to maybe buy a ticket. Otherwise “ya dun goof‘d” man.

IE is the root of evil

You know what ? Internet Explorer is maybe the only browser used in Korea. Google Chrome ? Firefox ? What’t that ? We don’t need it. Our code is IE 4.3 fully compatible.

Conclusion

Thinking like a technology engineer (juste being IE compatible in 2002) makes bad UX.

Not thinking about the technology (putting great graphics but with no code evolution perspective) makes bad UX too.

You’ve got to consider both. Put a designer and a programmer in your team. Make them work together. Not one after the other.

Korean air is not really a nightmare of graphism and color, but truly of experience. Things seems right at a glance. But when you click and use it seriously it’s just impossible.

And you know what ? I tried to buy a tickets to it’s competitor Asiana. Same problem ! Do you believe it ?