I learnt a very important lesson very early in my software testing career.
Every now and again I do something which, with hindsight, seems like a really stupid thing to do. Take this example. I was purchasing an e-book on line where the payment page had an orange square box with the text “Click here to purchase” written on it.
I spent just over a minute trying to figure out where to click to make the payment. And yes that does seem stupid with hindsight considering there was an orange box with the text “Click here to purchase” displayed. So why did I find this so difficult?
Well firstly, like most people on the Internet, I scan hundreds of pages a day of web text, so I do just that …. i scan rather than read in detail. I wasn’t looking for the text “click here”, I was looking for a button to click.
Secondly, the orange square box with text in it didn’t react to the cursor changing shape when you put the mouse cursor over it. The designer had missed a fundamental principal of the Internet; the cursor shape should change to indicate the item can be clicked.
Thirdly, the orange box was embedded with lots of other images surrounding it, making it difficult to pick out from the crowd. In short this item, that they wanted me to click in order to make the purchase, was so far removed from any other ‘click here’ standard on the Internet that I completely missed it.
So how does this relate to one of the first software testing lessons I learnt. Well my reasoning is as follows.
Sometimes a software test I do may seem stupid on the face of it. However there are a lot of other ’stupid’ people out there with a similar level of intellect to me. So if I’m making the mistake you can guarantee that a lot more people are making exactly the same mistake.
This would tend to suggest that it doesn’t matter how stupid you think you’ve been when testing a piece of software, if you made the mistake you can guarantee that there will be hundreds if not thousands of people out there that will make that exact same mistake. So don’t let it go. Get someone to fix it!