What the election can teach us about QC

Driving to DC this morning I tuned into the Laura Ingram show, who was mid-rant about this NY Times article. She was sure that donors to the Obama campaign were shady characters who were contributing under false names to protect their identities.

As an IT professional, I recognized the names immediately. Anyone who works in software development and testing is well acquainted with Mr. Test Person, Mr. & Mrs. Jgtj Jfggjjfgj, and of course, little Asflkj. We are also quite familiar with the company Fdsa, as well as it's sister corporation Asdf.

This is not the forum to make judgments or pontifications about either campaign or the legality/ethics of their fund raising practices, but I will say that the Obama campaign's website developers could brush up on their testing practices.

Let's say these contributions were innocent test transactions made my testers or developers. Shame on them. There are ways to test software in a production environment that don't result in garbage data.

Or, maybe these contributions actually were made my people who wanted to conceal their identities. Shame, again, on the software development team for neglecting to include some basic validation. There may not be an easy way to identify false first & last names, but a simple integration with a service like Group1 would eliminate the possibility of getting contributions from fictitious cities like Rewq, ME.

So what have we learned?

1. Always include adherence to industry or government regulations in your business requirements.
2. Don't forget to include non-technical business requirements in your test plans.
3. Orchestrate your testing in a way that does not result in test data living in a production environment.
4. When hiring a vendor, ensure that they adhere to good project management, software development and testing practices.

Double your efforts for all of the above in cases where minor errors could result in major public scrutiny, like oh, say, running for president.