What's Behind Your Product?

There is a lesson in photography that teaches you when composing a shot, to not just pay attention to your subject, but also check the rest of the frame to make sure there is nothing lurking in the background that should not be. This will help you keep trees from growing out of people's heads, and other distractions that would make your photography less compelling.

One of the main products that I currently work on is BlueOrganizer, which is a Firefox add-on for smart browsing. Given that we run in Firefox, we are very much dependent on having a solid Firefox behind us as a platform. Last week Firefox had a minor update, 2.0.0.5. Well, it was minor for them, but it totally broke some important functionality in our product. Luckily we happened to realize this quickly, and were able to get a hack patch out to work-around the problem.

This reminded me of that photography lesson. It does not matter if your product runs in a browser, native to an OS, or on a device. As testers we tend to focus on testing our product, and ignore the foundation it runs on. We focus on our own stuff and don't think about the potential problems behind it, often until it is too late.

For us it was lucky we found the problem on the same day Firefox started to roll-out their update. It would have been better had we found it the day or even the week before. This would have saved our users some frustration and saved us from yet another fire-drill. What I should have done, and will now do in the future is to keep track of what the folks at Mozilla are up to, and work out some way to try their new releases before they are released.

What does your product rely on, and how can you keep it on the radar?