Google Reader

There seems to a problem on the web, there aren’t any testers. Yahoo has been scootling up lots of really intelligent people, I’ve met them, I’ve seen what they can do. Yet they seem to be releasing sites to the public that have obviously not even had the most rudimentary testing, sure they call them Beta’s, but they’re not even alpha quality. Do they simply not hire a Test team, or are the test team just no good?

Yahoo maps arrived a couple of days ago, I got nothing but a blank page using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP service Pack 2, see the image. I can’t understand how any tester managed to not raise the bug, and as it’s a complete failure of the site and a 2 minute 100 character fix for the developer it surely would’ve been fixed if it had.

Then on the front page of the maps site, I get another obvious problem, there’s a little popup feedback request button, which I can’t click the yes please button as it’s positioned right on top of a select element which bleeds through - the bug is obvious and serious, the fix is trivial, yet it’s released in this state. I’m not running some weird browser, I run regular IE with just font-size set to smaller, and flash disabled in the manage add-ons, and my background colour a nice yellow, you’ll note the tester missed the failure to set a background colour too of course.

Yahoo aren’t the only people to not bother with testers, they’re just the people that triggered this rant. Developers generate bugs, any of the testers who’ve worked with me know I generate lots of them, fortunately testers find bugs, and together you get a good product, it seems that in too many places this is simply broken.

Now I’m sure you’ll all be thinking, come on these bugs are silly, who really cares about people who disable flash, or if they can’t click on a survey link? It works fine for normal people. However these aren’t the only bugs that the Yahoo testers have missed, there are others, anyone got a security contact for yahoo?