QA, anyone? Digg QAing?
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
It is not easy to deploy and maintain a popular web application; however, quality standards should be observed.
Digg has made a few changes on their site, but not the changes the majority want (the comments section is still painfully broken). The latest changes include the addition of new subcategories (but no an images section) and a couple of changes of their images (and CSS).
I wonder if digg has a QA department? Maybe they don't and let the crowd to find and
report their bugs--it's the Web 2.0 way, I guess, but I'm not falling for it and won't report for free. On the other hand, I can create detailed bug reports on my site (for free). This is a very minor bug, but a bug nonetheless:
The background colour is not flushed with the border of the image. This is very noticeable, but nobody is fixing it.
The biggest problem I found, though, is that the site looks really bad on IE7. I know IE7 is not the best target for the latest standards, but in any production environment this shouldn't happen. For example, the web applications I develop (and have developed) must work in IE6/7 and FireFox. If the applications don't work on these 3 browsers, it is considered to be broken.
This is how it looks in IE7 (click the image to see the original size):
Details of the subcategory menu:
Details of the "All News" title:
Details of the "Top 10" menu:
Again, IE7 is not the most compliant browser when it comes to web standards, but I think digg.com should display consistently on the most popular browsers. Further, there are a lot of people using IE7 now a days, and this is not 1993, when every site had a disclaimer stating that "this site is best viewed with Mosaic version 2.1 at 800x600 resolution." (I know, I created a couple of those.)
Of course, digg.com is free application so our expectations as users are greatly lowered, but these bugs CAN be fixed.
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