Today's tip was submitted by Zach Fisher.

Even business owners are subject to inattentional blindness. Their vast experience allows them to perceive certain scenarios as impossible, improbable, etc. Sometimes their rationale is enough to convince me of the impossibility; other times, it is not. It is in these times that I'm compelled to use my '0908' card. What is the '0908' card?

It happened in September 2008, hence the '0908' moniker. Many of us lived blissfully ignorant of the complex financial forces at work around us. Our inattentional blindness was fed by the fruits of happy path living: nothing is going wrong NOW. It is not that we're stupid. We just had no compelling reason to suspect otherwise. It wasn't until activities in disparate areas, leading to a confluence of improbable circumstances, resulting in a global financial meltdown - that it became reasonable to suspect the 'out-of-left-field' scenarios.

You certainly don't want to overplay the '0908' card ( "What if a meteor hits our server farm on Feb. 29, 2012?" ). Nor do you want the conversation to degrade into a puddle of techno-babble. It may be more practical to assert things like, "I know we don't support Linux distros now, but what do you think about Ubuntu's growing market share?" or "Are your friends getting netbooks like mine are?". Enlightening business owners of those disparate dependencies - invisibly churning within their systems - may head off certain disaster downstream.

I'm again stealing a tip from David Christiansen (he's on a roll lately). Checkout his post on using cross-site scripting to get out of a testing rut. From the post:

<script>alert("f")</script>

Paste it in every field.

If an alert pops up OR the field gets saved and then gets rendered without the script tags, you’ve found a cross-site scripting vulnerability.

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As a side note, in a very funny turn of events, when I originally wrote this blog post I was rewarded with the following...

Many times, when testing websites, we forget about the static content of the site. Here is a simple tool that applies some simple heuristics to help gauge the effectiveness of the content on your site. Even if you don't end up using it, as you read through it you can get some ideas for how to make content more accessible.

I was talking a look at Google product search and wanted to think of the simplest test I could that might reveal a lot of information. After the page loads, if you simply hit the refresh button in your browser repeatedly, you'll be able to notice the following behaviors:

• query response times change each time


• some sponsors change each time, while others don't


• column width (between product description and price) changes based on sponsor size

This gives me several ideas for testing and learning about the product. First, I feel like I could quickly program a script to track sponsor results and performance over time time. If I varied the search criteria for similar products, this could quickly be used to start to verify the accuracy of  adds and the rules for displaying them. This could also become a good no-load baseline for the performance of whatever environment you're testing in.

Understanding the relationship between sponsor text (number of characters) and column widths would be worth looking into. Might be an issue, might not (likely not and issue). But it's also something that can be verified quickly and repeatedly with the script that's pulled together.

When I was learning MCOASTER, I put this graphic on a post-in and put it on the bottom of my monitor. I then asked people to randomly quiz me on my test status throughout the day. People would walk up and say, "Hey Mike, can you give me a quick update on what you're testing?" I'd look at the post-it and quickly walk through each of the elements as I outlined my testing.

You can do this with any testing heuristic, technique, or idea you want to learn better. Find a way to sumarize it, write it down, and then ask people to help you use it. If you only put the post-it note there, you'll eventually stop seeing the post-it note. It will just blend it. You also need people willing to help you practice.