Archive for the ‘water cooler’ Category

The pains of poor testing: Loss of customers, blocked airways and public ridicule

I picked up on a couple of headlines in the press last week that deserve entry into our Software Testing Hall of Shame.

Computerworld reported that the Co-operative bank was ‘losing customers’ through system problems.

Co-operative Financial Services has severe system problems that are causing it to lose online customers. Users told the BBC they were unable to access their accounts at times, and that transactions online often do not work.

Marc Palmer, from Gloucestershire, who runs a small business, told the BBC: “A lot of the time you can’t even log in. Other times, you can’t see your bank balances or any of your accounts listed. There comes a time when it’s damaging to your business.”

The bank is now set to upgrade its systems in response to the complaints of customers, who vowed to move to a competitor, BBC Radio 4’s Money Box programme found. John Hughes, director of retail products at the bank, apologised for the “inconvenience, difficulty, frustration and irritation we’ve caused our customers”.

FAA Computer Glitch Delays US Flights

Flights ground to a halt throughout the USA on Thursday morning, reported Stickyminds, after a mysterious computer glitch hampered a key Federal Aviation Administration flight processing system.

The system electronically inputs pilots’ flight plans to computers, telling air traffic controllers the anticipated route and altitude of each flight after taking off. ABC News, who originally broke the story, said Controllers they spoke to had to enter those plans manually, resulting in a slowdown of takeoffs and landings.

Bird Brain Collider

Oh, and because it made me chuckle, I’m including a tweet this week, courtesy of @danfusion – http://twitter.com/danfusion/status/5460071784. Speaking about the latest in a string of failures concerning The Large Hadron Collider, he says ‘Thinking about software testing: How many times has an app broken because of a bird brain with bread?’ If you haven’t read the story, It seems that the billion dollar piece of machinery has yet again gone caput, this time due to a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator!

Software Testing Hall of Shame: Big Blue Red Faced over poorly tested congestion charging debacle

This week IBM step up to the podium in our Software Testing Hall of Shame. Computerworld UK yesterday reported that London’s congestion charging payments system crashed after IBM took over the contract.

London drivers were unable to pay the congestion charge online on Monday, following a system glitch after IBM took over the work from Capita. The problem emerged after IBM began a “significant upgrade” to the transport agency’s computer systems. IBM had spent the weekend – when no congestion charge is applicable – migrating data from Capita’s databases to its own systems, as it took over the work.

It looks as though the IT giant was not very ‘rational’ in its approach and did not fully test the system before go-live on Monday, as Computerworld reported “there were issues with the new systems and some of the data matching between different programs.”

A spokesperson at Transport for London, which operates the congestion charge, apologised for the online problem and insisted no registered drivers would be penalised if they had had problems paying. She added that the glitch was “resolved by the afternoon and all of the new IBM systems are up and running as they should be”.

The IBM system upgrade is aimed at saving TfL £200 million on running costs by 2018, but so far IBM has only cost the company, in terms of lost revenue.

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!

Great Places to network with other Test and QA professionals

(Part 1 – Linked-In)

Linked-In is fast becoming one of the best platforms to pick up industry related news and network with other professionals. There are literally thousands of Linked-In groups, so much so, that finding the most relevant, biggest, best or most active groups can be a bit of a challenge!

To help you on your way, here is a selection of the groups we’re familiar with and can heartily recommend.

Agile (4,813 members)

Agile Enthusiast (638)

Agile Progect Management Group (3,851)

Agile Testing (595)

Agilistias (2,415)

American Society for Quality (11,054)

Automation Testing (518)

Methods & Tools (822)

QA Automation Architect (664)

QA Test Automation (1,010)

QA/Testing (1,193)

QAGuild Network (5,545)

Quality Assurance and Test Professionals / Analysts (242)

Senior Testing Professionals (1,579)

Software Test & Performance Group (914)

Software Testing & QA (997)

Software Testing & Quality Assurance (19,957)

Software Testing and Quality Assurance (2,561)

Software Testing Club (3,705)

SQA forums (2,366)

Test automation (3,875)

Test Development (552)

Test Management Forum (530)

Test Republic (298)

Test strategy and test management (741 members)

Software Testing Hall of Shame – Survey reveals hidden price of software failures

Apologies for the lengthy gap between posts - I’ve had to hold off from blogging while our new look website and blog were launched. We’re really happy with the look and feel of the new site and would welcome any feedback from our visitors. Please get in touch and share any thoughts with us.

This week’s Hall of Shame entry isn’t an actual company for once, but rather lots of them! A new survey uncovers the hidden cost of software failures and the importance of testing.

The survey, announced this week, reveals that a quarter of projects overrun or are delayed due to technology failures, adding on average 90 percent to the original budget and seven months of extra work.

The importance of testing was highlighted as a critical but underestimated element of good project practice.

“We found that people that suffer long delays, often have small, or no annual budget for testing,” said Professor Pentel, founder and chairman of the research group, Customer Experience Foundation (CEF). “Testing is an afterthought service rather than actual key element.”

 You can read the full story courtesy of Techworld here – http://news.techworld.com/applications/3202326/survey-reveals-hidden-price-of-technology-failures/?email

Software Testing Hall of Shame: Sears grilled over web blunder

We have a new entry to our Software Testing Hall of Shame this week , this time courtesy of Justin Dessonville. If you don’t already follow his iamdez blog check it out, it is a good read.

He reports “It’s a well-known problem with websites that if you trust user-submitted data that you will get burned.”

Sears literally did get burned by their own incompetence when their website started promoting ‘Grills to cook babies and more’.

“The problem wasn’t a huge lack judgment by the Sears product team, but rather a lack of understanding about displaying variable names and values in the URL. A lot of sites do this by default, but the Sears site took it one step further. If a specific page became popular, the results were cached and displayed to users.” he says.

To get the full story, there is a good explanation on reddit.com comments

Representatives from Sears said they were victimized by “someone visiting” the company’s Web site. But it seems that the unusual listing was due to technical flaws in the mechanics of the company’s own website and not a ‘defacement’ at all. As one of the commentators on Reddit puts it – “it was pure incompetence on the part of Sears, and not a malicious hack.”

Software Testing Hall of Shame: Software Glitch Grounds UK Chinooks

The UK Ministry of Defense is taking flack for eight Chinook helicopters that have reportedly been grounded since they were purchased (8 years ago) due to a software glitch. Sky News reports that the Ministry allegedly tried to save money by writing their own software for the aircraft, reports the Aero-News Network

An MoD spokesperson told The Independent “We have repeatedly admitted we have made errors in the specification of the software package within the contract. This has already been subject of much parliamentary and media comment. Problems with the original procurement of the eight Chinook Mk3 helicopters are well documented. Although the eight aircraft were delivered to specification by the contractor in December 2001, there were capability shortfalls which were largely due to insufficient evidence to demonstrate the avionics software met UK Defence Standards – the Chinook Mk3s featured unique cockpit avionics which were a hybrid of analogue and digital systems.”

The paper also quotes Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Nick Harvey, who said the MoD had showed “disastrous incompetence” in buying military equipment. “Shamefully, it is frontline troops, not ministers, who are paying the real price for this Government’s failures.”

Good reads that come in 7’s

James Whittaker has recently started a great series of blog posts on the Google Testing Blog – The 7 Plagues of Software Testing.

So far in James’ posts we have encountered The Plague of Aimlessness and The Plague of Repetitiveness.

In The Plague of Aimlessness he asks “Where are the testing spell books? Surely the perilously attained knowledge of our tester forebears is something that we can access in this age of readily available information?” The answer is not. There is a distinct lack of collective knowledge and information sharing within teams. Testers are walking in ever more aimless circles repeatedly suffering ‘the aimless thrashing that we suffered’ already. He urges testers to “Document your successes, scrutinize your failures and make sure you pass on what you learn from this introspection to your colleagues.”

The Plague of Repetitiveness, he argues is caused by just aimlessly ‘doing it’ some more “Developers test but then we retest. We can’t assume anything about what they did so we retest everything. As our product grows in features and bug fixes get applied, we continue our testing. It isn’t long until new tests become old tests and all of them eventually become stale.” He likens it to Boris Beizer’s pesticide paradox. “Pesticide will kill bugs, but spray the same field enough times with the same poison and the remaining bugs will grow immune.”

I’m looking forward to reading more as he posts them.

In a similar vein (we must have been drinking from the same creative juice carton) our very own article – The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Test Automation – is due to be published in the latest edition of T.E.S.T Magazine. In this article we take a light-hearted look at Dante’s Divine Comedy to uncover some home truths about software test automation. We explore each of the seven deadly sins as traps people can fall into because of their earthly vices. I hope you get a chance to read it and would welcome any feedback on it. If you haven’t come across T.E.S.T Magazine already, it is a great read and well worth subscribing.

Parcelforce deliver poor quality package and land themselves in our ‘Software Quality Hall of Shame’

This week’s Hall of Shame entry is courtesy of Computer Weekly – Better testing may have prevented Parcelforce data breach.

The data breach at Parcelforce that exposed customer records online was reportedly down to inadequate testing of its website site.

It was revealed last week that when customers entered their parcel tracking numbers online, they were able to gain access to other customers’ delivery details. The fault was thought to be caused by scripts used on the main landing pages of Parcelforce’s website, which appear to have been developed in-house.

Parcelforce claims to have fixed the problem, but UK privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is to investigate to find how the breach occurred to prevent it from happening again.

The QA team at Parcelforce needs to get better testing tools in place and sort out their software quality process – You don’t see things like this happening to DHL (who happen to be a customer of ours!)

Listen again on iPlayer to George being interviewed by Debbie McGee

George Wilson, our esteemed Operations Director and Nepalese orphanage fundraiser, spent his Sunday morning, huddled up to the Debbie McGee in the studio at BBC Radio Berkshire!

George, his daughter Laura Wilson, and her friend Claire Gomer, were interviewed on Debbie’s Sunday morning show about the Nepalese orphanage and their fundraising efforts. They talked about what an important cause it was, Laura and Claire’s experiences out in Nepal, George’s Charity Golf Marathon and even our efforts here, at Original Software and our ‘Corporate Cliché Swear Jar’.

You can listen again on the BBC iPlayer here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p003hpyn/Debbie_McGee_28_06_2009/

You need to scroll forwards to 1 hour and 17 minutes in to catch the interview with George.

Thanks to everyone for their help in raising money for this cause. In total we have raised around £5000 already. If you haven’t already donated, here is the link to the Just Giving sponsorship page – http://www.justgiving.com/georgeandstuart