Many users pooh-poohed news of the hole, simply resolving never to accept messages from people unknown to them, but then there are consumers like Katie. Katie uses different versions of her name (as I am doing now) when she signs up for things like Internet service, so she can tell who sold her mailing address to whom. Once on the Internet, she zealously guards her privacy with so many cookie-catchers and the like as to make using the Web thoroughly unpleasant - if not impossible. Her teenage daughter, whose waking hours have been unnaturally extended since AIM came along, begged me not to tell her mom about the AIM news story for fear of a total lockdown.
If only AOL had tested for that hole, they might have been able to save all this anguish and a whole lot of money that comes with it. That's the premise behind software quality assurance (QA), a practice that Mike Salisbury would like more companies to understand.
Salisbury is the brain behind logicalQA (www.logicalqa.com), a new, Freeport-based consultancy through which he offers his expertise in running software, especially websites, through just about every possible crazy test he can think of - and you can't.
"You have to be very creative," he says. He pictures himself as the company owner who may want to give herself a big bonus that the payroll system developers never imagined, asking "Hmm, what happens if I enter eight figures in this field?" Or he'll just play clumsy, laying an elbow on the space bar to see how the program reacts. Salisbury may know a great deal about a client's software and what its developers expect it to do, but he finds that these "black box" tests yield more results than if he were to be well versed in the code itself.
"I know how the programmer wants me to test it," Salisbury says. "I've already done that in the initial round. That's the boring test," even though he acknowledges how important it is. "But then I sit down, wipe my mind clean and say, I'm looking at this screen and I've got four steps to do. What happens if I do the last three?"
Salisbury believes his tests are more efficient and effective than those haphazard ones customer service reps are asked to do. "Whereas a customer service person will say, 'Hey, I found a bug, I don't know how to fix it, and I don't know how I did it,' I don't report a bug that isn't repeatable," Salisbury says. "I narrow down step-by-step to the critical point, to the exact step where the code is broken. I spend less time testing and the programmer has a very focused task. If coders are left with ambiguous requirements, that will kill everybody on a project."
So he's cheaper than programmers but more qualified to review their work than most people in-house, who are either too close to the product to see its quirks or too sophisticated - or too technophobic - to replicate real customers.
Salisbury says some larger Maine companies know all too well how expensive mistakes can be and test their software regularly with automation. LogicalQA targets a slightly different audience, sometimes a harder sell.
"Among smaller companies there's a perception that adding QA is more of an expense item than a revenue generating item," and they just have the coders test the programs. "Programmers are trained to code," Salisbury says. "Customer service reps are trained to help customers. No one is testing who is trained to do testing."
Salisbury has been doing software quality assurance in one way or another for seven years. With the launch of logicalQA, he hopes to keep doing it for a long time. "My goal in any organization is to develop the trust so that the owners or whoever will be able to trust me to put a red or green light on the release," he says. "That they would come to me and say 'Mike, is it ready to go?' and if I said no, they could believe it was the right answer."
Jenna Lane is a freelance writer and a reporter for News Radio WMTW in Portland. She can be reached at editorial@maine-biz.com.