Welcome to Chez Cliff!

I’ll be the first to admit: quality checks are killing me.

With version 2.0 getting closer and closer to being released, I find that the quality checking is grinding my brain into mush.

Over 100 features will be released with 2.0.  Each must be checked.  The users will hardly be aware of half of them, which is fine.  The application is built to automate the process and that automation makes the application quick and easy (marketing points) to use.

Now the programmers are normally responsible for all the quality checks.  They still are.  My issue is that it’s my product going out the door.  The programmers don’t face the wrath of an angry public if something doesn’t work.  So I test.

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To give you an idea on the testing involved, let’s take a look at how I approach one item.  On my Expenses screen, one line item is for Property Management.  Property Management (PM) is a function of the monthly rent.  Monthly Rent x PM% = Monthly PM Payment.

In the real world, you can’t have a simply equation like that.  Why?  Because someone is going to write in and say their PM charges a flat monthly fee.  Or someone is going to write in and say their PM calculations are based on a yearly basis (which they did).  For Yearly, we had to add a calculation that takes the monthly payment, multiply that by 12, and get the yearly payment.  Now we have 4 values that need to be tested.

For the equation, any one of the fields has to be editable and must automatically update the other three fields.

Here’s my quality checklist for just this one line-item:

• Does default percentage equal 7%?
• Does PM Monthly Dollar amount equal 7% x Monthly Rental Income?
• Does Yearly Dollar Amount equal Monthly Dollar x 12?
• If I changed the default percentage to 5%, does the monthly dollar automatically change?
• Does the monthly dollar amount equal 5% of the monthly rent?
• Does the yearly dollar amount still equal monthly dollar x 12?
• If I write in a dollar amount for monthly dollar, does percentage change accordingly (two decimals?)
• Does the Yearly Amount change to equal the new monthly dollar amount X 12?
• If I enter a Yearly Amount, does the percentage and monthly dollar amount change accordingly?

What does the user see?

• If I enter in a number, I get the correct result.

Mush.

Next time, I’m going to talk about how I alleviated all this quality testing.