Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Bad Aer Lingers after online booking nightmare
Flight company’s booking system, not only riddled with software glitches, but they are so un-customer friendly that in order for ME to do THEM a favour and let them know why their web sales are so poor – alerting them to the software glitch, I either have to pay £s per minute to call their website helpdesk or post a blog about their immense screw-up (thereby shame-facing them at the same time) There is simply no other option available on their website for getting in touch with their webmasters – Come on guys a simple email address wouldn’t hurt, would it?
Sorry, deep breath, this has just got me so riled!
So, knowing that I was planning a short break in Spain later in the year, a friend kindly forwarded me a promotional mail he had received from Aer Lingus, about a sale on flights to Malaga.
Well, I’m in Marketing, so I was never going to be fooled that it would actually only cost £29.99 (not when you take into count that I wanted to fly at the weekend, I actually wanted a seat and to take a bag etc), but anyway, £102.56 each for me and my husband (plus a handling fee of £20) didn’t seem too awful.
Happy with the flight times – check.
Think an extra £370 pp to be able to take checked bags, have seat selection and airport lounge is a bit extreme, but happy to run with the cheap option – check.
Flights cheaper than taxes – typical – £20 handling fee snuck in there – typical – check.
Well, ready to complete the booking then…
Click continue.
Start filling in my details, scroll down – OMG!!! How come the price has suddenly hiked itself right up to almost £600!!!!!
Ouch, that’s a nasty software glitch. Working at a company that actually manufactures software testing solutions, I can tell you straight off, that this here is an application error – and not just a malicious ploy by the budget airline to part you from more of your hard-earned cash! It seems that Aer Lingus have not been testing their application very well. We’ve seen time and time again that choosing not to invest sufficiently in quality assurance can really come back to bite you on the rear end! With ample time devoted to testing, better test coverage, some validation rules and database effects, this would have been picked up way before it went public. Oh well.
Maybe some customers might not have double-checked the price again, and unknowingly proceeded, only to be ripped off by the good chaps at Aer Lingus, but more likely, customers like me, would have just been put off and decided to check out prices at BA instead! I guess I’ll do a good dead and let them know – perhaps suggest they buy our software while they are at it… An hour later and after crawling their website, I discover, to my annoyance, that unless I want to waste even more of my time and money phoning a premium rate number, there really is no way to contact their technical team! GRRRRRR! Oh well, at least it is good fodder for our ‘Software Testing Hall of Shame’!
In trying to re-create the error before I put this post live, I came across another, completely different bug , where the system now wouldn’t process to that last screen, but looped me back to the start again. Do they do ANY testing on their systems? It’s just riddled with bugs.
Drilling deeper into the World Quality Report
Some good headlines about emerging industry trends came out of the recent World Quality Report produced by HP, Sogeti and Capgemini, but as I read deeper, some things started niggling at me, so much so that I decided they were worthy of a blog post.
For instance:
‘Only 4% of IT professionals agree that their ALM investments are fully paying off, and only slightly more than a third said that half or more of their solutions have been fully implemented and are helping to improve application quality.’ (Pg.8)
HP and Sogeti state that ‘QA organizations need to focus on increasing the adoption rates of their purchased technologies’. This is of course great advice, but both companies have a vested interest in these users throwing more and more money at consultancy, training, and in HP’s case, overpriced and difficult to implement products, (that consequently need a lot of ‘services’ cash thrown at them).
In my opinion it would be more prudent to look in more detail at why these companies are not getting a return on their investments or managing to fully implement their products.
The answers seem to fall into three categories. Company issues, Resource issues and Technology issues, with technology resoundingly winning the prize for biggest stumbling block.
20% failed due to lack of an internal process or support from management. The question does beg to be asked – how on earth did they ever manage to purchase their ALM technologies without some form of internal support? To make ALM successful, it must touch more than just the QA team: support needs to be gained, processes mapped out and business goals and requirements defined way before you make decisions about what technology to buy. It’s really not surprising that these projects failed.
26% stated that not enough resources were invested into the adoption of the technologies. Now I could have classed this under company issues, but I think you really need to look deeper than just writing this off as a staffing issue. It could equally be a technology issue. Was it that not enough staff were trained? Was the project badly planned? Was the technology too complicated for users outside the dev/test team to adopt?
In terms of technology, a whopping 41% struggled because their ALM investment was the wrong choice of technology; it failed to integrate with other technologies or was too complicated and required specialist skills that were thin on the ground. I’ve lost count of the amount of times we hear stories like that when meeting companies across the globe. To truly embed a solution in your company, you need to empower all stakeholders. Unless everyone involved in the delivery of IT projects can collaborate using the solution, it’s just not going to work. When choosing a solution, you need to think about how easily management, business analysts, business users, developers, project managers and testers are able to get what they need out of the solution.
‘Companies prefer testers who have both strong technical skills and relevant domain and business knowledge’ (Pg.11)
Well the stats don’t really allude to that. The question that was asked was – When hiring testers which of the following skills are most important to you? Well obviously QA skills came out tops at 31%. Having a good grounding and understanding of the principles of Quality Assurance is key for testers, I’m actually more surprised that this figure wasn’t higher, but interestingly, the second largest desired skill is business knowledge (22%). This is something we come across time and time again with companies we talk to; so many of them utilise business users for the testing phase. Take SAP testing for example, business process is key. You really need to leverage the knowledge that the business users have about how the system is supposed to perform and exactly how they all use it. So many of the accounts we’ve been into have been literally banging their heads up against a brick wall trying to work out how to capture this knowledge or utilise these testers, knowing that it is impossible with their current toolset – HP is just too cumbersome to get non technical business users to adopt. Development skills 9% and scripting skills 10% are actually rated incredibly low when you consider that the market dominating tools actually force these prerequisites upon QA and make these skills imperative at sites where these traditional tools are embedded.
‘Nearly three quarters of respondents say that they do not follow [common test management methodologies]. Instead, their organisations develop and document their own best practices that are followed in the majority of development and testing projects. (Pg.10)
Different groups in the organisation may adopt their own ‘versions’ of the standard practices, and as a result, the company as a whole is not fully realizing the benefits of standardization, economies of scale, common metrics, unified reporting and asset reusability’
Not all companies are equal and each has different ways of doing business. One size DOES NOT fit all, so surely it is good for the industry that companies develop their own best practices? These companies are just using their brains and working out what best suits their own unique needs and circumstances.
Software vendors should be supporting this very obvious progression of development maturity. Why shouldn’t they be able to all work slightly differently, yet still enjoy the benefits of unified reporting, asset reusability, common metrics etc.? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that HP hasn’t built its software to be this flexible? Maybe it’s time for the dominant market player in test automation and management to listen to what businesses need rather than telling them how they should be working!
This particular bone of contention was revealed earlier this year with a survey of Application Development Managers back in April 2010. The industry is really crying out for flexibility in the way that tools allow them to work, which is one of the reasons that Original Software developed Qualify, a process and methodology agnostic Application Quality Management solution. Qualify allows businesses to map their own processes, use standard methodology templates, tweak them to suit their own needs and even run multiple methodologies across different teams and projects, with – wait for it, all the added benefits of unified reporting, metrics, re-usability and economies of scale.
Go and check Qualify out.
Agile Test Automation, Can It Be Done?
Join us on our next upcomming webinar, “Agile Test Automation, Can It Be Done?”
http://www.origsoft.com/webinars
George Wilson, Original Software, will be hosting the webinar this Wednesday, May 12th 2010, discussing the reality of test automation in an Agile environment.
Agile is a methodology that requires a change in the way QA and development work together. The use of technology and automation are much more difficult and finding a practical approach to testing is critical for successful Agile projects. This webinar will explore how testing in Agile is different and George will give pragmatic advice to ensure application quality.
Listen in and learn how:
* To overcome the barriers to Agile automation.
* You can progress into automation gradually and easily even in an Agile environment.
* Your application quality can be managed with complete visibility.
If you haven’t already registered, make sure you register today at: http://www.origsoft.com/webinars
The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Test Automation
Just to get into the spirit of Halloween next week, take a look at our new whitepaper, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Test Automation,” (cue evil laugh). We do enjoy being original and I am sure you will have a little chuckle to yourselves with this one!
In this whitepaper we explore each of the seven deadly sins as they relate to software test automation. Instances that Original Software comes across time and time again and traps clients have often fallen into because of their earthly vices.
I don’t want to give too much away, so if you would like to download this webform free whitepaper, here is the download link http://www.origsoft.com/whitepapers/seven-deadly-sins/
I am quite eager to see what you think of this piece, so please write back with any comments! If you have a great sense of humour, why not reply back with your own software testing deadly sins!
Linked-In User Group Launched
Just a quick post to let you know that we have just launched an Original Software User Group on Linked-In – http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1981507
Created especially for our customers, we’ve created a forum where you can chat to other users, share experiences; give us feedback on our products and access tips, tricks, inside information and support. We hope you’ll all join and make a success of it.
