In many ways Soup’s test room is a lie. The machines all run fairly recent versions of Internet Explorer, none of them are seriously underpowered and none of them are in regular production use. This means that no-one changes their fonts or installs an office bar or anything so heinous. It also means the res creeps up to 1024 once in a while. A much better way to test a product is on site. That major shoe company site I developed would have launched a day earlier if we had gone on-site and tested on their machines. Their MD had a copy of IE 4 which we can’t get because it’s Win 95 only. I think the same applies to Flash and Director.

An additional benefit is that if errors do occur they can be fixed then and there to the customer’s satisfaction. No more ringing up and saying “I’ve changed it, can you check it again for me? OK, so, right, what’s it doing now? [cue 5 minute description of something unrelated to the error].

Test on-site, even if you hate them and it’s fucking miles away.