Category Archives: Legal

Learning, Legal, Privacy, Programming, Secure things, Techies conferring

The Clokie Project

In December 2018 Katherina Clokie, a known speaker, announced to look more outside the Tester community.

My reaction

Amazement, grief.

After a few months I realised that it was not a bad idea.

My change of heart

My wife has some really tough questions I have to answer. The biggest one is:
“What did you learn?”
Right behind each test conference.

So I reduced my number of test conferences and number of hours at the conferences. There are still some really good conferences like TestBash, Agile Testing Days, and European Testing Conference with plenty of awesome few insights.

I attended a lot of other conferences and after a while I would be just happy to pick up something new.

There is more to gain at a conference if you only know the basics. With more than 20 years of experience it is a way less.

It was time for my Clokie project.


Time for a small flashback to October and November 2018. I already had looked outside the Test Community.

Here are some notes from Infosecurity 2018:
In case of doubt treat data as personal data. Zip code and house number are personal data.

In EU there are several privacy government organisations, but they have different focus on privacy issues.

Steps in case of data breach:
Secure proof
Look in the logging
Determine scope
Communicate
Remediate
Learn

A change of behaviour can indicate an identity theft.

The way of accessing data in the cloud is the weakest link.

In GDPR, the European Privacy Law, a penalty is used to let the company feel the pain instead of putting a company out of business.

GDPR is not applicable for dead persons. But there can be other laws which are applicable for dead persons.

Meet the expos

How to attract people to an expo? Goodies, free access, and talks.

Some Healthcare and ICT notes of me in random order
Anonymize pictures, determine objects of interest, and annotate them using smart software.

First step is vision and then involve stakeholders like care providers, health insurers, and suppliers.

Patient panel discovered that 60 % of the patients want a personal health environment.

Care providers like hospitals and doctors are stimulated. They get money on basis of results and not on actions taken.

Law of customer’s rights. E.g. A care provider should only get information which is needed for the care to be provided.

Misconfiguration is becoming the weakest point in defense.

Meet the meetups

010dev is a small meetup in Rotterdam. It has Dutch characteristics like gezellig (cosy) and Buy Own Drink. It is in a pub after all. Once in a whole while it is in a company.

During my meetups there are no lectures, but I still listened a lot. As a tester was I am able to follow the small talk and tech talk?

In a few hours a lot of subjects passed. Programming languages, projects, and new trends were discussed. Somehow I could understand bits and pieces.

Developers.nl had a more traditional format for the meetup: free drinks, free meals, and free lectures.

I went to two meetups. The first one was abstract. It was about architecture. What are good guiding principles to set up a complex environment?

The second meetup was about vue.js. This was a challenging one. I had only basic knowledge about JavaScript and HTML. So I read some ebooks about vue.js which are based on these languages.

This talk was more understandable for me. The speaker shared some tips about vue.js.

How to speed up the performance by loading the needed content in 2 stages? First the necessary stuff was loaded for the web page. The rest followed while the user had a first impression of the page.

Looking under the hood

My blog has been made with WordPress. One day I was blogging and a conference in Rotterdam was announced in the dashboard.

There were some particular benefits: 25 Euro for a ticket including lunch, an environment friendly environment, meeting other WordPress users, short traveling distance.

As a tester I had not had a chance to attend a talk about accessibility. I honestly don’t understand this.

This conference offered more talks about this subject than I could process. I skipped the last ones.

Another interesting subject was security headers. It is possible to make WordPress secure. I was thinking that a header only contained some information.

For the interested reader have a look at my conference digest mind map.

Finishing thoughts

Retro: did I learn more than previous years?
Yes.

But what did I pick up in those previous years?
Mostly subjects related to programming and law. Less about testing.

Just made me think.


On Twitter Trish Koo placed a thought provoking tweet. In order to become better in software development  you have to learn both testing and programming.

Accessibility, Legal, Programming

A Bit More Responsive

Years ago some websites looked terrible on my smartphone. They looked like websites viewed from 6 meters distance.

The first time I visited my blog with my smartphone, I was really anxious: “Does it look right?”

5 seconds later “What did I worry about?”

Disclaimer

I am not a legal expert. So please have a look at my used sources. Or contact a legal expert.

I am just a tester finding test ideas about accessibility. Thanks for joining in advance.

Some test responsiveness stories

My first tablet app to be tested was intended for an iPad. I had a Windows PC instead of the tablet. This was not right.

My solution was to install Safari and let it emulate an iPad. In other words: “I know you are a Windows machine. Now you function like an iPad.”
It sounds like a hypnosis act.
“What did I worry about?”

This work around did not stop me to demand an iPad. There is nothing like the real thing.

Responsive web design is basically about creating the best possible user experience in the assigned space on the screen.

This blog looks good on a mobile device and a laptop. The same features are shown only in a different order and in a different way, but it feels the same. Really responsive.

The last years I learned CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. CSS determines how the websites looks. It is even possible to change the locations of web elements.

If I look to this website in a browser on a laptop, I can make the window smaller by resizing the window. The effect is that elements of the web page are resized or relocated or not shown any more.

During a debriefing a developer showed me this resizing trick.
Resize and look for bad things like hidden buttons or partially shown texts.
It is a fast way for the first impression.

Can not install on my machine

All that resizing stuff is not an exact science and Safari … cannot simply be installed on a company laptop because of a company policy. So I did a bit of research. If you don’t mind.

Firefox has a special feature Dev Tools. It can be accessed using the F12 key. In the upper right corner of this sub window there is a button with two rectangles, which look like a smartphone and a tablet.
A green eclipse marking a button with a smartphone and a tablet in the menu bar of Dev Tools!

This opens a lot of options to test smartphones and tablets.

It also support the screen orientation like portrait and landscape.

Just look to this website on a mobile phone while holding it in portrait mode. Then change it to landscape. In portrait mode only the headers of my last blog posts are shown, in the landscape mode the last complete blogs posts are shown. Courtesy of my website software.

Chrome and Edge also have Dev Tools which can be accessed using F12 key. Both Dev Tools windows have an emulator tab for mobile devices.

Concerning responsiveness

One of the biggest search engines decided to give a higher ranking to mobile friendly websites. So support for small screens can give a positive boost to let a user find a website.

Most people have a PC or laptop with 1 screen. It is sometimes tedious to switch application. So I tend to resize the applications to fit more of them on my screen. My preference is squeezed and usable.

Another thing for responsiveness is language. Some customers prefer to use a website or application in their own language. OK is translated to OK, but Cancel to Annuleren or Annullieren. So the button should be resized after translation.

Responsiveness is not only about reshuffling web page elements. It is also about resizing the web page elements in case of bigger fonts.

Suppose I have bad eyes, then I need to make fonts bigger so that I can actually read the text. Pressing the Ctrl key and the + key at the same time will enlarge the text in browsers and Windows applications.

Problem solved?
No, I am so sorry.

As a user I have to scroll a lot. It is like watching a picture which is split over three different screens. I have to change my seat to get the whole picture.

In 2024 this could have some legal consequences in Europe.
In Annex 1 of the European Accessibility Act “flexible magnification” is mandatory for specific commercial websites.

In case of American customers for an e-commerce website there is a law already in place at this very moment. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) explicitly points to  the WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on page 196 of Americans with Disabilities Act Title III Regulations.

In WCAG  also attention must be paid to screen size and orientation.

One more chat

“How would you like your website?”
“Responsive please.”
“No problem.”
“Thank you, my dear.”
“You are welcome, grandma.”

Learning, Legal, Marketing, Programming

Link Missing In Action

“Know the ways of all professions”
– Miyamoto Musashi

UX designer

A few blog posts ago I told about my attempts to make this very blog more accessible. I just walked my talk.

For people who need a story:
As a user with no or bad view I want headers tagged as headers, so that the screen reader can read the headers differently aloud.

Web master

I changed the look of the headers in a lot of blog posts. I went in a flow and gained more speed in the process, until …

A small square disappeared. I just did an undo and continued editing.

The next time I let the square disappear, I had already updated the blog post on the web.

Hit the OK, Jack.
[on the melaody of “Hit the road, Jack”]

This was not good for my user journey. I did not want to lose a user by a missing link. Just stick around.

Tester

There was an easy trick for finding missing links. On the internet there were free websites and add ons for browsers available.

Marketeer

As a marketeer I had some problems with broken link reporters. A reporter had to hit every page and every link in it. So the number of hits would increase significantly.

Even worse there are web pages referring to other web pages. So some pages are counted double. Then there are categories and months referring to pages. So some pages are counted more than twice.

This would hide the real traffic in my daily reports. But this is not a company web site. Otherwise I should have to add a note about a maintenance period. For an auditor. So I could skip this role.

Tester again

First pick of a broken link service stopped half way. The second looked promising, but it had terms and conditions.

Legal expert

Now I was curious. I clicked on the link and landed on a page with lots of legal sentences. Must be American thing.

I tried to distil the information. The most important message was that the service was provided as is. There were no financial consequences for the service providers.

I have a website which does not provide me any income.
So what was I waiting for?

Enter my website and show my broken links you can find.

Author

Now it was the turn for the author to have a fix.
Yeah. Sure.

The first broken link was ejc2008.de. This is short for European Juggling Convention 2008 in Germany. More than 10 years ago. This must be an old-timer.

I entered the URL in the browser and got an error message. After 10 years the website was taken offline. But I needed a link.

Then I looked for internet archive wayback machine in my search engine. This website stores all versions of visited websites. I entered ejc2008.de and found my website.

I picked a link to 2019 copy and replaced the link in the blog posts. This way people can still read about a convention which was visited by more than 3,000 people sharing the fun of juggling.

In my list of broken links I found a link to a Let’s Test conference in 2015. I had a better link available, so I just updated the link. A similar situation for the first TestBash conference in the Netherlands.

It was a simple test tool. No need to switch to tester mode.

Another run of broken link test revealed that I had not changed the About me page. Why did they show up now? No idea.
Anyways. Fixed.

3rd test run revealed no more missing links. But something was wrong. I missed the comeback of the square. Popping back in view.

Web master again

In my memory I tried to locate the square. It was during header 6 handling. Then I remembered the use of anchors.

An anchor is a fast way to get a reader at the right place in a blog post instead of the top of the post. This saves the reader some scrolling. Example time.

In my blog post about a test exercise the following code is shown in my code editor:

My last upload before my workshop was for me <a href="http://mindfultester.com/a-look-behind-the-scenes/#disaster">another exercise in exploration</a>.

In my blog post “A look behind the scenes – in Runö” the following code is shown in my code editor:

<h1><strong><a id="disaster"></a>Flirting with disaster</strong></h1>

A broken link checker only checks whether the link exists and ignores the presence of an anchor. So it was an anchor missing in action.

Now I had to check the 90ish blog posts for anchors. Preferably automatically and not clicking all links myself. Please.

If I could only find them. I got a flash of insight. It was possible to find blog posts with a search engine in my Content Management System or website authoring program.

I looked for #. And yes, all blog posts with anchors and links with anchors were listed. Now it was easy to add missing anchors.

Professions

So I was

  • Tester
  • Marketeer
  • Legal expert
  • UX designer
  • Author
  • Web master

I skipped the auditor though.