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.
Mr Johnson apparently told LBC radio: “I have no doubt lots of things will go wrong.”
He insisted it would prove a “great success” in the long run but added: “The reality is that the software issues and technical issues of getting the whole thing up and running for tomorrow has been extremely difficult.” “It will be more of a gradual launch than a big bang. I have so many concerns it’s hard to pick one out.”
It seems that the blonde haired buffoon had not allowed enough time for adequate testing of the scheme and ironing out the kinks. By this point they were left with little choice but to go ahead with the launch despite concerns, but as the saying goes: Failure to plan is planning to fail.
Unsurprisingly Monday morning came with numerous reports of mayhem in the capital over the weekend.
The London Evening Standard reported that a quarter of both the promised bikes and their docking stations weren’t ready in time. The Boris bike section of the TfL website froze on Sunday and users yesterday claimed their electronic keys were not working despite activating them online. Problems have emerged with people who purchased multiple electronic keys from the same bank account – the daily or weekly subscription charge is automatically levied on all keys as soon as one is used, even if the others are not in use.
Oh dear, Boris.
The Telegraph humorously reported that ‘Mr Johnson, who describes himself as cycling like a “very elderly French onion seller”, admitted he is expecting “delirious” criticism of the scheme.’
The Dark Side of Application Quality Management at the TMF
30 July 2010
Jonathan Pearson, Original Software, did a fantastic presentation at the Test Management Forum in London, on Wednesday called: “The Dark Side of Application Quality Management: Ten Black Holes to Avoid For Successful Application Delivery”.
The session was lively and Johnny impressed the crowd with his Obi Wan Kenobi Jedi Knight costume complete with light sabre for pointing at the projector screen and Star Wars sound effects. Johnny had no idea that his impressive presentation would leave its mark and he is now known by friends and colleagues as Johnny Wan Kenobi!
The force was certainly with young Jedi Johnny that day as he pulled in a crowd of 45 people, sharing his wisdom on application quality management, collaboration and avoiding a QA silo. The topic was widely applauded and many were intrigued, (or at least laughing out loud), when he introduced a new hybrid methodology between Vmodel and Agile, called Vagile! One tester present has already blogged about it: http://pedantictester.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/uk-test-managers-forum-28-july-2010/
If you missed this event and would like to attend the next one, the TMF are meeting up on 27th October 2010. For more information visit: http://uktmf.com/index.php?q=node/11
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.
Our view is that traditional test automation systems originated in a world that moved at a much slower pace, where waterfall developments were the only game in town. No-one attempted to tackle fast moving, mission-critical applications, because they knew that the technology simply couldn’t keep up.
These legacy products get their capabilities from powerful scripting languages; something that sounded good in a presentation, but has become a horror in the real world, requiring a cult of high priests (highly skilled and paid test automation engineers) to communicate with the complex and mysterious deity; the test automation tool. Heaven help them if the application changed and the tests needed to be run again!
What companies need in order to overcome the cumbersome nature of test automation, is a solution that makes the art of automation so quick and easy, that they can afford to throw it away if needs be. The biggest barrier of adoption of automation remains the level of maintenance required to sustain it!
Download an Original Insight: “Throw-Away Test Automation”, to explore the issues of test automation and the challenges of implementing automation in an Agile environment.
Original Software’s robust approach to software quality helps Vermont Information Processing reduce release bottlenecks and improve customer support forecasting
Vermont Information Processing (VIP), IT solutions supplier to the beverage wholesale industry, has utilized Original Software’s end-to-end testing solution to increase its software quality. Even with an intensely accelerated development schedule, VIP has improved its customer upgrade experience and reduced pressure on its support team. This in turn has enabled the business to respond effectively to the complex requirements of its customers during volatile market conditions.
A period of market consolidation had caused significant growing pains for VIP. As its customers’ operations increased in complexity, the software that they relied on to manage their business needed to be able to handle much more complicated processes. VIP’s old development cycle just didn’t fit this new development schedule. Putting out new releases became painful, not just for customers and its development team, but the support team was also beginning to feel the repercussions.
With the help of Original Software, VIP was able to develop a much more robust approach to software quality. The company has completely turned around its QA process and overcome its customers’ cautious attitudes to upgrades. VIP has now transformed into a software testing center of excellence with happy customers who are keen to upgrade to new releases.
Since implementation, VIP’s QA department has increased the scope of test coverage, taking control its test environments, comprehensively unit testing and running full regression tests on all system updates. Previously customers went on average three years before updating systems, creating a bottleneck in the upgrade process, now 97% are running a recent version of the software. The team has also vastly reduced the strain on support. Fixing a single bug could save support around 80 hours; it takes a lot less time to run the regression suite now, which on average turns up 10-12 similar bugs. This equates to five and a half months of support time per release!
VIP moved from having one major update release every three years to producing major releases once a year, with numerous maintenance builds in-between. The old eight month-long beta testing phase was too time consuming for the business with its new rapid development schedule and it could no longer afford to do this. With the crunching development cycle, quality was becoming an issue for VIP. “Our customers were really frustrated with us,” explained Bobby Erwin, Quality Control Analyst at VIP. “To get a new feature, they’d also get all these other problems to boot. This would become a strain on the support team too, as they’d spend hours on the phone going through problems.”
“Our main business drivers were to reduce the level of risk by increasing the scope of test coverage. Original Software was the ideal choice” said Erwin.
VIP purchased the solutions from Original Software in May 2007 and once they’d had the initial training it took two or three months to develop their first regression capabilities. They’ve been developing and building on these tests ever since. “Prior to this we conducted no regression testing at all – just a month or so of acceptance testing by customer service and then the beta tests. Now we have a battery of tests we perform every time we release,” imparted Erwin.
“We are providing a much more robust and better product to the end users,” said Bobby Erwin. “Our support and customer service teams are delighted. Our builds are just so much better now, and we can also tell them exactly how risky a release is, and predict the levels of support that might be needed.”
“The regression tests help us manage our exposure: improving experience for the customer, decreasing support needs for a given update. Testing gives us a feel for how stable the build is. It’s a known entity. If the build looks good in testing, we can install with greater confidence. If we find problems, we get a better idea of the support resources needed,” confirmed Chris Boucher, Support Manager at VIP.
It's not a bug, it's a feature! Apple: 'Hold your iPhone 4 differently'
25 June 2010
Apple and the iPhone 4 feature in today’s topical entry to the Testing Hall of Shame. As reported by computerandvideogames.com, ‘The geniuses at Apple have put their heads together and come out of the lab with a simple fix for the iPhone 4’s bizarre reception issue: hold your phone differently.’
This week saw the release of most sought after smartphone on the planet, the iPhone 4, but a fatal flaw was quickly discovered – that holding the gadget in a certain way kills reception, which means making phone calls or downloading games is rather difficult.
Here’s a video of the issue, courtesy of TechRadar –
Apple’s statement brushes off the defect as a common issue that is found in most devices.
“Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas,” it says.
“This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.”
So, if you’re having problems, hold the phone in a different way or spend more money to fix the issue preventing the device from performing its primary function. That’s that then.
TechWorld reports that ‘One user saw a boost in signal strength after wrapping the phone in a Ziploc bag, call it a super-cheap alternative to Apple’s $29 bumper. Another post on Apple’s forums recommends covering the sides of the phone with InvisiShield tape. But as one official Apple forum-goer noted, “Apple needs to fix this problem, we should not have to rig a fix for a brand new phone.”’
Thorough testing should have uncovered this bug, but how are Apple now going to appease the thousands of customers who not only queued up for up to 32 hours to get the buggy phone in the first place? One speculation is that Apple are going to release a propeller for the iPhone 4 so that it can hover next to your ear while you make a call!
Today we are officially launching Qualify to the world. Our brand new Quality Management solution aids business agility and unifies the software delivery process.
A recent independent report highlighted a huge amount of discontent in the market, with 84% of those surveyed stating that current products did not meet their functional requirements. Built with the purpose of directly answering these needs, Qualify unites all aspects of the software development lifecycle from requirements through to release. It is also fully integrated with Original Software’s manual and automated test execution solutions for the user interface and database layers.
Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication throughout. The methodology agnostic, entirely code free Quality Management solution, even comes complete with a smart phone interface, allowing instant access to cross-project information from just about anywhere.
Businesses now have a much better option than Quality Center from HP. One that really answers today’s business needs. Colin our CEO had this to say about the launch - “With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development teams have had to adapt the way they work, requiring processes and technology to support the dynamic nature of their businesses. The absence of a holistic solution for ensuring quality when managing the Software Development Life Cycle has been a bone of contention with the customers we speak with.”
We really think it’s quite brilliant and hope you do to. Check out our brand new Qualify page http://www.origsoft.com/qualify, where you will find links to some great resources including datasheets, a comparison document, analyst reports on Qualify and a new whitepaper with a great Star Wars theme entitled ‘What Yoda can teach us about Quality Management’
We hope you have had the opportunity to enjoy our series and would like to invite you to join us one more time for our final educational webinar topic: “Having a Holistic View of Your Application Quality”.
Your applications are no doubt essential for running the business, and as such you need to ensure that you manage their quality throughout the software development lifecycle. Join us on this webinar as George Wilson, COO of Original Software, explores the importance of having a unified view of the application quality function.
If you haven’t already registered, make sure you register today to learn how you can improve your business agility throughout the application lifecycle: http://www.origsoft.com/webinars/
What data do you use for your test environments? Production, generated, subsetted, masked? So many different approaches, but which way works best for you?
If test data is a topic close to your heart, you might be interested in a free webinar that we are running – ‘Get a Grip of Your Test Data’
It’s not too late to register for our third webinar in this very popular series on software testing and quality assurance.
“Get a Grip of Your Test Data” by Tim Bower will help you to put together a business case for ensuring the importance of having accurate application data for development and testing.
As you know, effective management of data is a critical component in ensuring that your test strategy delivers quality applications. But in meeting this challenge, are you protecting sensitive personal and financial data reducing the amount of storage space required for this data?
Listen in and learn:
• Practical steps for building an accurate test environment efficiently and legally
• How to ensure test data privacy within your test environment
• How you can manage and verify the database effects of your test execution
Join us for this webinar and learn more about the different strategies and techniques that can be used to support your test environment and improve the software quality within all your projects.
