5 Tech Incidents/Events That Establish The Importance Of QA

Global enterprises and businesses across diverse sectors are adopting every feasible emerging and innovative technology solution to achieve the desired consumer experience and response. In this race to achieve the market space and quick recall from the target audience, brands and businesses tend to fall into the quality loopholes. Eventually, it becomes much more evident why Software Testing and Quality Assurance have become so critical for achieving profitability and sustainability.

We look at five incidents in 2017 to understand and gauge the growing need and significance of Quality Assurance even in 2018.

Apple Security Flaw

Apple users faced a major flaw with its macOS High Sierra Operating System, where it provided anyone with physical access to a Mac machine gain system admin access even without entering a password. This was confirmed by Apple while its engineers worked on a software update to fix the issue and further publish a step-by-step instruction manual to support and protect its customers.

A Twitter update publicly disclosed that there were vulnerabilities with Apple’s macOS High Sierra Operating System. While this went on across the social network, the team was already on it. Eventually, more issues were exposed in the process of resolving the security concerns, where Apple users were unable to authenticate or connect to the file shares on their Mac devices. This led to release of another support document to help Mac owners to get access to file shares.

This incident proved that thorough Security Testing and processes such as Vulnerability Assessment are absolutely critical in software development and release.

OnePlus 5 Software Glitch

Since the launch of OnePlus 5 there have been complaints from the users on various grounds such as they couldn’t connect their smartphones to working WiFi, not access the internet, and so on. These have been accepted by the company and are being worked on for their future software update.

There have been several software glitches that have eventually ruined the end-user experience, and the most recent one appeared on Reddit’s Android forum. This was when users complained that the OnePlus 5 handset would reboot when a call was made to 911 for emergency services. This was found in UK as well for the emergency number 999.

These compatibility and integration issues tend to come up with any kind of service when multiple external integrations are involved. Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing are very much critical to ensure that updates happen on a constant basis and the integration is seamless and functional.

Airlines Delay Glitch

What could be worse than going off-schedule with delayed flights and getting stuck at the airport? This could happen due to rough weather, fog, or even an unforeseen software glitch, which occurred recently when airports around the world went on a standstill after a software program used by major airlines went down. The software company announced that it was due to a network issue and went on to resolve it.

The software is used across 189 airlines, and thus affected major airlines such as British Airways, Lufthansa, Thai Airways, and Air France. The problem was reported at airports in Asia, Europe, and America, which established the high dependency of air travel on software functionality.

Airlines is a major sector and very much customer-intensive, where quality assurance is a must to build resilience of software and ensure performance even during crisis situations.

Voter Records Exposed

Data Breaches for gaining access to voter data has been common. However, on June 19, 2017, researcher Chris Vickery discovered a publicly accessible database that comprised personal information of about 198 million US voters, and which ran almost 10 years back in the records. The data firm had hosted the database on an Amazon s3 server, however over a terabyte of voter information got publicly accessible on the internet. This happened via misconfiguration, which is critical and a common cybersecurity risk for both institutions and individuals.

Cloud Security and security of virtualized data is a growing concern as more and more online predators are looking out for sensitive data. Cloud Testing is important to ensure that the data on a common or private server is secure and accessible to the authorized parties only.

Ransomware Attacks

2017 has certainly been a year of ransomware attacks and scares. The WannaCry ransomware spread across the globe just like wild fire, without sparing public offices and major corporations. It almost crippled the offices, busy emergency rooms, and crazy work schedules. Ransomware attacks such as WannaCry and Peta have left cyber-scars that the world has to yet recover from.

This has certainly hiked the importance of Security testing and the need to build solid cyber walls against such attacks. QA not only helps you to build robust solutions, but also helps build resilience in a volatile cyber scenario. Notably, these ransomware attacks were not able to get the expected monetary returns, but could definitely create panic in the cyber world.

In Conclusion

Whether it is customer experience, growing cyber threats, or building stronger applications, Software Testing and Quality Assurance have always been enablers. That’s the very reason enterprises have been investing intensely in building the right testing frameworks and leveraging them for building profitability. Moreover, acceptance and implementation of emerging technologies is impossible without testing them for relevance within the overall dynamics of a corporation. There is no end to how QA can enable businesses to build better products/applications and stay upbeat in the competitive market scenario.

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