Bugs Cost the Business

This open letter originally appeared as a post on LinkedIn.

Dear QBD Books…

Good software design matters. Without good software design for your Web site, users may have trouble, and that trouble can cost you money.

Testing matters too. Testing experientially matters. Without experiential testing, you won’t discover certain things about your site that represent bad design. And that can cost you real money.

Let me explain. Today, I wanted to purchase two copies of a book so that I could present them as gifts to a couple of colleagues. I went to your site. The book was easy to find. Entering the delivery information — the offices of my client in Sydney — was easy too, until I got to the required phone number.

I tried the international format that appears on my client’s listing on Google: +61 123 456 789 (that’s the pattern, but obviously not the real number).

I tried the same without the international prefix: 123 456 789

I tried the same without the spaces: 123456789

Ah! There’s a little question mark icon to the right above the phone number field. I click on it. A popup appears, saying “In case we need to call you about your order.” It doesn’t say anything about what the phone number field needs to get past the obstacle.

Maybe there’s some local tacit knowledge that’s required to address the issue; maybe “everybody knows” to enter a 0 or a 2 before the number, or to drop the 1 at the beginning, or whatever is necessary to get the software to co-operate.

What “everybody knows” really means that everybody the programmers thought of, or everybody capable of reading the programmers’ minds knows what to do.

But often programmers don’t think of everybody. They might think of themselves, and the people they know, and the people they like. That’s reasonable, but they might not think of people like novices to the site, or visitors, or newly arrived immigrants, or people who are sending gifts from other countries… or hackers, who will do things maliciously.

Of course, unskilled testers — or people who are only doing shallow, confirmatory testing — won’t think of these problems either. From poking around on LinkedIn, I was able to find a couple of developers, but no testers (nobody with “tester” or “testing”, or “qa”, or “quality” in their titles, at least).

So anyway… I didn’t buy my books; I couldn’t. I went to The Nile Group, whose site handled everything perfectly. That cost you over $200 in revenue… and that’s just this time, because I’ll be going back to The Nile Group site next time.

By the way… the book I was wanting to purchase is called Taking Testing Seriously. It seems you have at least a couple copies in stock. Still.

Your friend,

Michael Bolton