Friday, March 16, 2007

Keeping up with the MySpacers

A couple of posts about work this morning, which doesn't reflect the intended balance of this blog but for which I'm unapologetic.
Our company is launching a new corporate website to reflect its brand, the work it does, complete full service bla bla bla.
The site is (obviously) in Flash and quite funky. But does it work? Let's send an email out in an open source software style to the company and tell them there's a "PHAT" prize for the person who can find the weirdest error they don't yet know about.
There's a bit of a rumble of contentment goes around the office as any automated test produced 100s of errors. Then people start picking the bones through the site and finding more user-journey based errors (ever tried going back in a Flash animation?). So people compare and contrast what they've found and email it back to the project team.
About a week later I got an email from someone in the team saying they couldn't replicate the errors I'd found in Firefox. The team is using version 1.5. Why? Version 2 has been out of Beta for months. And the team have never heard of AdBlock, even though it's the most downloaded Firefox Add-On. Then I discover that this isn't from some bussed-in tester, but from a bleeding "Program (sic) Manager", that is one of the most senior people responsibility for delivery in the organisation.
Is it just me or is this company fucked?

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