Joseph Cooney had a brilliant idea for a new application certification program. But Vista's bland white-on-gray badge, in my opinion, doesn't properly communicate the.. authoritative.. nature of said program. With the help of Jon Galloway, we zazzed things up a bit:
Heh. There are days I wish I could hide behind such certifications with Subtext. When we get the most obscure error report. But alas, unless I’m hosting everybody’s blog on my machine, I don’t have that recourse.
Wait, now there’s an idea!
P.S. I didn’t see the Works On My Machine T-Shirt. Let me guess, works on your machine.
For an advanced certification, add a feature that overrides some default behaviour that changes for .01% of the customers. Run it against your same old test data and confirm that indeed, for this case, the overriding behaviour isn’t called. Job done!
Never add automated tests. Why waste time writing tests when you can be spending that time writing code? For bonus points, check in your changes if the test looks “good enough”, or if the test fails but you didn’t notice due to doing it two minutes before clocking off on a Friday afternoon.
You’re aiming a bit high. I’d like an “Works OCCASIONALLY on my machine” Maybe with an added “Just after a reboot if i don’t touch anything else and I sprayed my immediate surroundings with voodoofied chickenblood and applied the correct raindance”
But maybe it would be a bit too long to put on a logo. Upside is that it would make the text very small and thus unreadable and more usable…
Your point is well taken, but I think you’re being a bit TOO harsh. There really are plenty of instances where the user’s machine, or something else in the environment, causes obscure differences that couldn’t be legitimately foreseen. It seems like every month or so around my work, we get a customer that can’t use our website properly because some non-standard router along the way is illegally breaking up packets or something. The lengths we have to go to account for oddities that are outside of the pale is remarkable.
Which isn’t to say that this can’t be used as a copout.