Automated testing is great but by ThinqLinq

Automated testing is great but

I agree that automated testing is great, but don't forget to give your app a visual test before releasing.

OK, so a brief explanation may be necessary. I decided to take the advice of a colleague who recommended changing sites over to XHTML1.1. I gave it a shot and fixed all of the issues the compiler complained about. It compiled, it passed the tests, it must be good to go. Ship it!

I get home and try to show the site off to my wife. All of the fonts are 6 point on a page that specifies that they should be 12 pt. A bit of investigating and I find 2 areas that were missed by the automated systems.

  1. Although I converted the upper case tags to lower case in the .ASPX files which had the doctype set properly, I missed it in the .ASCX files.
  2. Some of the HTML based tags in the CSS (specifically TD, TH, A) were still capitalized whereas the corresponding tags in the pages weren't.

Moral of the story. Make sure to give your UI a User Inspection prior to releasing to check for things the automated systems missed. The upside is that it gave me an excuse to play with ASP2.0 a bit. I've been working in Winforms so much that I've gotten rusty with Webform development since I last worked on it for certification. Sometimes you need a good kick in the pants to get the ball rolling again.

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