Never count on a spell check to alert you that you spelled a word correctly in the wrong context!

Perhaps this has happened to you. I went to the store and got a package of X. When back at home I wanted to use the X. The packaging was beautiful. Obviously someone had spent some time on the design of every aspect, especially the self-promoting advertising that covered the whole package. My puzzle was about how to get the X out of the beautiful package. Upon careful examination I found (in 8 point type, 25% gray printing over top of a giant image of a happy, beautiful person enjoying X) the word “Open” and a little tab of packaging. I puled the tab. It came off in my hand without altering the beautiful package in any other way.

So I attacked the beautiful package with a knife, making it impossible to reseal. I put the whole beautiful mess in a zip lock bag after extracting my portion of X.

I thought this may be a case of function being subverted by form. Not really. The package is a billboard designed to make you buy X. That is it’s function. Once bought, the job is done and you’re on your own.

OK, so the purveyors of X are capitalists and selling X is their goal. That’s all fine.

I will even go so far as to say that I got a tiny bit of enjoyment from the game of finding the “Open”. Then it all went badly. Don’t tease me like that, it infuriates!

Why can’t they get it right? Just make it obvious and easy to enjoy a fresh portion of X.

“Open” sets an expectation in my mind that isn’t fulfilled. Worse, I feel cheated, double crossed when it goes wrong. My experience of X becomes negative before even getting to the main attraction.

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Jeff Howell has thirty years experience in computer industry, spanning hardware, manufacturing, QA and software in engineering, management and consulting.

Photo by srboisvert

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Today's post is a contribution from Josh Hanagarne, the twitchy giant behind World’s Strongest Librarian, a blog with advice about living with Tourette’s Syndrome, kettlebells, book recommendations, buying pants when you’re 6’8”, old-time strongman training, and much more.

Typos In Graffiti

By Josh Hanagarne, World’s Strongest Librarian

Graffiti is lame, unless it’s cool artsy graffiti, the kind that gets its own coffee table book. But most graffiti is just dumb and ugly.

Two months ago I was managing a library branch in Salt Lake City. A large part of my job was cleaning up graffiti. There were the predictable locations like windows and desks, but I was constantly staggered by the places people chose to tag.

The typos drove me nuts.

The dumbest place I saw graffiti was on the leaf of a potted plant. “Snowflake 17” had claimed that territory and the worst of fates awaited anyone who trespassed on that turf.

There were others, of course:

Carved into a shelf were the words, Reading is dum.
Sprayed onto the mirror in the restroom: Totaly Samoa.
There was a great drawing of me on a desk that said, Ugli dick!

The list goes on an on. I know that rigid grammar laws are not on the minds of those who vandalize public property. However, it was hard for me to take declarations of I-own-this-table very seriously when the spelling was bad, even though the font was pointy and scary.

I must add that I saw one act of vandalism that I absolutely cherish. It will make me smile until the day I die. Maybe longer.

It was carved into a desk in the tutoring room:

I love math!

One other thing: I refuse to be intimidated by anyone whose street name is Snowflake.

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In this guest post, Jeff Howell talks about the differences between Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) in software development, and asks:

Where’s the process improvement part of QA? Why is no budget expended to determine if the whole process makes sense? How will improvements in efficiency come about if no effort is directed to analyzing where we are and where we need to be?

I’ve been working in software development for a while, but I’m still getting used to the usage of the term QA. The activities of the software QA groups that I have seen are centered around proving, with some level of confidence, that a software works, where works means it-does-what-the-requirement-says-it-should-do.

While this is important, it does not embrace the more important aspects in my understanding of Quality Assurance. So here’s my take on defining QA & QC based on experience in Software & Hardware development as well as Manufacturing management and engineering:

QA - Provides information to upper management regarding the likelihood that the marketplace will accept (buy) the product; and analyzes and improves the process that produce the products.

QC - Measures the outcomes of the process through testing and inspection and passes the results to QA for analysis.

To give this some practical sense, consider a company which designs and manufactures bicycle sprockets. At a high level the product life cycle follows a path like:

Continue reading "Software development, QA and QC" »