Reading about Quality

On occasion I read books on Quality that are basically throwbacks, or what I like to think of as historical documents.  Recently I was going through one of Juran's books on Quality to see what I might be able to learn and apply from what Quality Control and Process Design was all about before software.  This was sort of inspired by a recent book I read on Toyota and its evolution of Lean Manufacturing leading up to Kanban and its current practices, I also found out some interesting stuff on Toyota cars and how they are designed.  Considering I drive a Highlander and my wife a Camry it was cool stuff!

So while reading through Juran's book I noticed the following formula:

Quality = (Frequency of deficiencies) / ( Opportunity for deficiencies)

I wondered how I might be able to use this in my own arena.  Dealing with web sites that have hundreds or thousands of visitors a day there is no direct linkage here.  So just toying around with ideas I thought I might be able to use something along the lines of Visitors from our web analytics and determine then some number through contacts to our Support Organization to see if I could get an idea of Opportunity and/or Frequency through these numbers.  I'm no statician at all, so not sure if this will work at all but I would like to try out, as a mental exercise, whether I can get something useful from this and see if I can get an idea of what our Quality is.

Typically I am against just making up metrics, but in some cases I think its fairly good to be able to give a representable number to Business Users if that number CAN be representative and provide a USEFUL idea of what is going on.

Who am I reading?

Like many others out on the interweb, I tend to read certain blogs or newsfeeds on a consistent basis.  I do have a focus on Testing and Quality but I have a few other divergent interests, some align and some don't.

Without further ado, my list of favorites includes:

• The All Things Quality blog by Joe Strazzere
• Len DiMaggio's mostly Software Testing
• Angry Weasel by Alan Page
• Gojko Adzic and his thought provoking blog
• The other Michael Bolton
• The Boston 1775 history blog, which I find thoughtful and as a love of history this is great for me!
• The Sharepoint Stackexchange
• and the SQA Stack Exchange

Enjoy, if you are not already doing so!

Working with CSV and PowerShell for Link Checkers

One of the current tools in my toolbox is Xenu Link Sleuth which does a great job of scanning through our site and finding links that are broken or need updating.  Although while the report it gives is good to review afterwards it is difficult to send out to others, so to make the data useful to my business users I needed to make something that was more readable.  Since PowerShell is something that we use often it seemed an easy choice to write something that reads through the exported data and generates a useful report.

# Crawl Report
$crawlReport = Import-Csv "" -Delimiter "`t"
$crawlList = @()
# Page Map
$siteMap = Import-Csv "" -Delimiter "`t"
$siteList = @()
# Links List
[string] $brokenLinksList = "BrokenLinksList.txt"
[string] $brokenLinksOverview = "BrokenLinksList.csv"
# Clean up from last time
if (Test-Path $brokenLinksList) {
  Remove-Item $brokenLinksList -Force
}
if (Test-Path $brokenLinksOverview) {
  Remove-Item $brokenLinksOverview -Force
}
 
"Just some initial information on what we are dealing with."
"Crawl Report is " + $crawlReport.Length + " lines."
"Site Map is " + $siteMap.Length + " lines."
# Check each Address that has a Status-Code of 404, add it to an array we will
# use to get its origin from the Site Map
foreach ($row in $crawlReport) {
  if ($row.StatusCode -eq "404") {
    $crawlList += $row.Address
  }
}
"We now have " + $crawlList.Count + " broken links to deal with."
# Check in the Site Map for the Address as a Link to Page
foreach ($link in $crawlList) {
  foreach ($line in $siteMap) {
    if ($link -eq $line.LinkToPage) {
      # Pull these together to make it simpler to review later on
      $data = $link + "," + $line.LinkToPage + "," + $line.OriginPage
      $siteList += $data
    }
  }
}
"Overall there are " + $siteList.Count + " broken links to fix."
# Output the Address, Link To Page and Origin Page to a separate file
# since these were put together as CSV's earlier let's just make an
# exported CSV file for ease of use later on
"BrokenLink,LinkToPage,OriginPage" >> $brokenLinksList
foreach ($entry in $siteList) {
  $entry >> $brokenLinksList
}
# Now that we have everything in one file let's make it a CSV
$brokenLinksList | Export-Csv $brokenLinksOverview

This puts the data into a CSV file that can be filtered and sorted in Excel, which puts the data in a format that's more useful for my business users.

Operational Quality

In order to make sure that our production site is running properly, twice a week I do a check on the live site.  Mostly what I want to see is that the site is responding to search crawls, since our content needs to be available for queries by Users who come looking for specific topics.  I do a check to make sure current content is being crawled and indexed.  We don't want a stale index, and since the crawls run incrementally each night I check that the index is up to date.

Coming up with a name for this was hard at first since its not really maintenance but its not really an Acceptance Test in the strict definition of the word, if there is one in Software Testing, since the site is live and there are no changes.  I asked a bit in the Software Quality Assurance and Testing Stack Exchange and received the great suggestion of Operational Quality from a fellow poster.

So what does this comprise?

• I reuse existing SpecFlow and Selenium Web Driver tests in my Test Framework to query against the index and make sure I get results, checking the pages for terms I know need to be in the result set
• Query the SharePoint a backup of the content database, I don't want to interfere with production, for what has been added recently and look for those pages in the index
• Log in to the SharePoint farm Administration server and check the Search Service Application for Crawl Log errors.  There typically are some false negatives for access denied, but I have become accustomed to what to ignore over time (isn't that always the case?)
• Run some search queries on topics I know are in the site content or just want to be sure still come up

Twice a week I get a calendar reminder, to make sure I have time for this, to do the work.  I have made it easier for myself over time, which is something I try to do in a way on continual improvement, so it takes me maybe more time to log in to all the servers I need to check than for me to do the actual work.

Dealing with Redirects

We use a lot of redirects in my current environment.  I mean ALOT.  Currently we have 150.  While that doesn't seem like a big number in many ways each of these are loaded into the Web Servers memory each time it starts.  Often, every 6 months or so, I like to have these reviewed to see which ones are valid, and this is difficult since we have a tracking system for requests, and we store the files in source control but there is little visibility about which ones are actually in use.  Which led to my recent foray into PowerShell and XML.

I was asked recently about getting a list of the updated redirects for review.  Nothing new, again I do this every 6 months, mostly because some just get asked to deal with a specific marketing campaign, a scheduled event and we have a few that exist from when we updated our web site in July 2011.  Those update ones are there to point people who may have had links to information on the old site, to the locations on the new site.  At times even those age and need to be removed at some point.  Still getting the information wasn't simple since I needed to collate from multiple sources, until last week when I had some spare multi-task time in the afternoon and thought, "hey, I can do this in powershell!"

So I sat down and pulled the XML into a PowerShell variable so I could look at it:
 [xml]$redirectXML = Get-Content $redirectFile

From there I looked at the structure I was getting and looking through many of the nodes noticed that the one that was going to give me trouble was the system.webserver since that . notation typically means that you have another node.  Why Microsoft gives it that notation I don't know but this stumped me for awhile.  Until coming across an answer for something else I saw that when you have node names like that you use quote marks around them.  So while following the nodes down to the Rules section I wanted from the Redirect Map I came up with:
$rules= $redirectXMl.configuration."system.webServer".rewrite.rewriteMaps.rewriteMap.add

This gave me the first part, but then it was a simple matter to then pull out the actual rules:
$redirectUrl= $redirectXMl.configuration."system.webServer".rewrite.globalRules.rule

This helped a lot, so what I ended up doing was pulling these together then outputting them into a table delimited file so I could pull them into Excel.  In the end I came up with a fairly good script that pulled out what I wanted, it does need clean up and I would like to actually output into an Excel worksheet, but that is for later.  My basic script ended up being:


# Get the values that we will need from the command line

# So far I only need the path and name of the redirect file, the

# ApplicationHost.Config file

Param([string]$redirectFile)

# Constants that will be necessary

[string]$redirListDir = $null

[string]$redirectList = "redirectList.csv"

# Check that we have a file to pull redirects from

if( ($redirectFile -eq $null) -or ($redirectFile -eq "")) {
    "Make sure its the path including the name "
    "of the applicationHost.config that needs to be checked. Try something like "
    ".\redirectReview.ps1 C:\filelocation\applicationHost.config"
    "Thank you!"
    exit
}

# Check that we have a place to put the file at the end
if(($redirListDir -eq $null) -or ($redirListDir -eq "")) {
    if (Test-Path -Path "d:\temp") {
        $redirListDir = "d:\temp"
        "Using D:\Temp"
    }
    elseif (Test-Path -Path "c:\temp") {
        $redirListDir = "c:\temp"
        "Using C:\Temp"
    }
    else {
        "Cannot find a directory D:\temp or C:\temp. Create one and try again.`n"
        exit 
     }
}
$redirectListFile = Join-Path -Path $redirListDir -ChildPath($redirectList)

if (Test-Path $redirectListFile) {
    Remove-Item $redirectListFile -Force
}

# Open the file and put it in an XML format

[xml]$redirectXML = Get-Content $redirectFile

# Review the XML tags

# One of my old pointers

# $redirectXMl.configuration."system.webServer".rewrite.rewriteMaps

"Getting the Rewrite Maps"
# This gets all the rewrite Map redirects
$rules = $redirectXMl.configuration."system.webServer".rewrite.rewriteMaps.rewriteMap.add

"Now for the Global Rules"
# This gets all the rules that have been added
# Trying some different match formats that did not work
# $inputUrl = $redirectXMl.configuration."system.webServer".rewrite.globalRules.rule | % {$_.match)
# $redirectUrl = $redirectXMl.configuration."system.webServer".rewrite.globalRules.rule | % {$_.action}

$redirectUrl = $redirectXMl.configuration."system.webServer".rewrite.globalRules.rule

"Creating the output file"
# Output the claimed values into a CSV file that can be reviewed somewhere
$rules | % {
    $a = $_.key + "`t" + $_.value
    $a >> $redirectListFile
}
$redirectUrl | % {
    $b1 = ($_.match).OuterXML
    $b2 = ($_.action).OuterXML
    $b = $b1 + "`t" + $b2
    $b >> $redirectListFile
}

Starting my QA journey over again

It's been awhile, and even though I have had many older posts I decided to change venues.

Let's see how long this one lasts.

MIA - well I have been in action but not really missing...

So, 2011 was a busy year working with SharePoint. We did a major site upgrade where the old public site running on IIS was moved over to SharePoint, that was a major effort and took a lot of coordination with a lot of people. It came off really well, and has been successful since not many people noticed the underlying change, only the new look of the site. To me, that is a major success.

In addition I went through the task of learning SharePoint, as well as it's Search functionality, we had it going well for awhile then things just stopped. We still have no idea why, but it's been slightly educational in learning how things work. A nice environment where people just jump into things, help out where needed, and take the time to learn. That's what makes this job great.

Testing was a big focus, not only because we added a new person to help test last year, though she moved on it was good to sort of settle things and document much more. Teaching is always interesting since everyone comes in with a different focus and idea, that helps me readjust my thinking when I start to train someone. From that I have more wiki pages, more places to document what we have been doing and more documentation on just everything. I also got a start on automated testing, I now have a Framework with SpecFlow where I am now using BDD to create automated cases for Functional and Acceptance testing. First time the Acceptance Test was used after a deploy we found an error, that is success to me.

I needed to add goals for the year, which I am bad at, for myself I have overall goals but they get subsumed by whatever is going on at work at the time. Priorities come up and I need to learn something, say about writing a PowerShell script here or there, always something new. Though I think I am better now at focusing more on what I need to do and I will be going through that as a task for 2012. Should be an interesting year and I hope to do better about recording things here as well.