Historys Worst Software Bugs
Spotted a great feature on Wired today that fits nicely into our ‘Software Testing Nightmares’ hall of fame – check out that area on our website here.
As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don’t just inhabit our operating systems and applications — today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. Here, in chronological order, is the Wired News list of the 10 worst software bugs of all time … so far.
- http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2005/11/69355
Spreading a little love – some Valentines Day themed goodies for you
Valentine’s Day activities for geeks
Great story on ComputerWorld today – http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/careers-hr/my-career/news-analysis/index.cfm?articleId=2066&email – includes ideas such as technology-related films to watch with your loved one onValentines, twitter love hunt events and more…
Seven reasons to love a developer on Valentine’s Day
Adrian Bridgewater’s blog on ZD Net had me chuckling this morning – I often see that deep concentration akin to the ear-crumb incident he describes…
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10012138o-2000458459b,00.htm
and finally….
The St. Valentine’s Day Data Massacre
by George Wilson, Operations Director of Original Software
On the 60th anniversary of the legendary US gangster slaying in Lincoln Park, Chicago, it is perhaps appropriate to use the title of the massacre as an analogy to describe one of the most dangerous but widespread issues currently taking place in QA and testing departments around the globe.
Testing on live data.
Industry estimates suggest that approximately 70% of IT departments admit to using live data during their application testing process. One can understand why. It makes the testing more pragmatic, gives a clearer indication of true quality and allows the application in question to be tested more thoroughly. The problem is that this can expose sensitive data to less than sensitive employees or contractors.
The acquisition of data for testing may breach the Information Security safeguards of your live system which could result in fraud, malicious damage or even legal action if confidentiality is lost.
The simple fact is this: Carrying out testing on live data without the consent of the individual whose data is being processed is illegal.
“But it can’t be. And anyway, we have security procedures in place”. Regrettably that is the attitude of many hard pressed CIOs today. Organizations demand on time delivery of tested software, and live data tends to reveal more ‘real world’ errors or so CIOs have always believed.
But that doesn’t make it legal.
Starting with the stringent Data Protection regulations in the European Community, and spreading worldwide, the law says, very clearly, that the individual whose data record is being used must know the purpose of the processing.
Common sense and good practice say that exposing traceable production data to test disciplines is risky. Despite legal requirements and in some cases severe penalties for breaking them, testing on live data still tends to be common practice. One survey showed 62 percent of companies were using live customer data to test applications and 49 percent shared this data with outsourced testers, with no way of knowing if it was ever compromised*
So, what can be done? Is there a way for QA staff to carry on testing with live data without leaving themselves and their organization at risk? In short, can this ‘data massacre’ be eliminated?
Of course it can. With a clear Test Data Management (TDM) strategy in place you can ensure that you will dodge those data protection bullets, as well as being happy in the knowledge that your entire testing process is underpinned by good quality, legal test data.
Test Data Management is fundamental to the success of your test strategy; after all, data drives the entire testing procedure. With bad data comes poor testing, results you cannot trust, and a whole lot of wasted time, money and effort, and maybe even the odd legal dispute. It pays to get data management right.
Effective test data creation will address issues of disk space, data verification, data confidentiality and protracted test durations. Control of test data ensures that every test starts with a consistent data state, essential in maintaining your data in a predictable state at the end of the test. Checking both visible test results and the database effects is a key principle of Total Testing, a task which is practically impossible to do manually.
This philosophy enables a true regression testing capability to be built and automated, without the need for complex algorithms and checks to make allowances for changing data.
Intelligent data extraction functionality dramatically simplifies the process of creating and extracting data subsets from your live database – with great efficiency and full referential integrity with no program complications. With total control to amend data during extraction, and the ability to extract data from remote sources, data maintenance becomes simple and efficient. Data integrity, for any purpose, is assured.
For more information on Test Data Management, and how Original Software can help you avoid any test data massacres, log on to www.origsoft.com
* The Insecurity of Test Data: The Unseen Crisis, – a Compuware / Ponemon Institute study
Debenhams sets store by improved quality
Debenhams, the leading department stores group, has turned to Original Software to help save its IT department time and money, enabling it to deliver system enhancements more rapidly and raise the quality of its dotcom website through more thorough testing of the back-end systems that drive it.
With online sales bucking the retail trend in the current economic slowdown, the Debenhams.com site is of strategic importance to the group. Now more than ever before, ensuring the quality of, and IT service delivery to, the online shop front, is vital to capitalising on its success.
Dominic Nash, Business Systems Controller at Debenhams is anticipating significant time and resource savings as a result of their investment in Original Software. “It’s been just a few weeks, but we’re already up and running with the system, and a task that had previously taken us more than two weeks – extracting test data – took less than half a day using TestBench”.
The Debenhams team wanted a comprehensive solution to help with unit, system, end-to-end, and regression testing of their IBM systems, which were largely being manually tested up until this point. They undertook comprehensive study of tools on the market, looking at performance, ease-of-use and specific product features.
Nash continued: “The functionality in TestBench is first rate. Being able to automate tests to run overnight will generate substantial time-savings. The database extraction tool allows us to quickly and easily extract data from the live systems, creating a subset for use in a realistic testing environment. You can create checkpoints, rolling back the changes and resetting the environment if it becomes corrupted by any testing activity and TestBench is so user-friendly it’s taken us virtually no time at all to get up and running.”
“The same Debenhams team will prove even more advantageous to the business, delivering applications with increased agility, improving efficiency and raising service levels across the board.” concludes Nash.
