Source: HWSW, www.hwsw.hu/, June 5th, 2009

What links NASA, the American space administration, and Google, the world’s leading name on the net? What have they both managed? Both of them have suffered serious mishaps on account of failing to test their systems properly. Testing experts Alvicom (www.alvicom.hu) help companies to avoid such mishaps.

Minor errors – Major Problems

NASA began putting their Mars Climate Orbiter project together some 15 years ago and, after a rigorous final five years of development, they were able to launch the probe on the 11th of December 1998 with the aim of gaining reliable data on Mars’ atmospheric climate. The probe reached Mars’ atmosphere on September 23rd 1999 and the braking system was deployed to stabilize the probe at the planned orbiting altitude. Not long after, the probe, price-tagged at USD 125 million, was destroyed.

The explanation is triflingly simple: the guidance system back on Earth dealt with variables in Anglo-Saxon Imperial units such as Pounds and the probe’s systems were designed to expect metric units such as Newtons. So all calculations of force were out by a factor of 1 to 4.45, the probe was thrown into unbearable deceleration and the correct orbiting height was lost. The probe dipped lower into the atmosphere and broke up.

The fact that such a huge disaster can occur due to faults in an IT system is not so much dependent on the actual size of the fault but rather on the proportion of faultiness which is then carried forward into ensuing actions and functions. Google, themselves, suffered an avoidable crash, christened the “Gfail” by subscribers, which may have been caused by a similarly small oversight but which lead to no less enormous a setback for Google. Major losses of advertising revenue aside, that crash probably cost Google countless new users and a lot of prestige and reputation.

Just one percent of their users leaving without being replaced would mean losses estimated at $10m per year for Google, and all because of a poorly tested fault-tolerant clustering solution. Of course there are plenty of Hungarian examples of this too. In the melee of their End-of-Year, a certain financial institution lost face and business because their offer-generation system, under the strain of a greater than usual volume of transactions etc., failed to produce good enough response time for online business requests. Those are symptoms of a lack of both stress testing and also the required re-integration of erstwhile malfunctioning system elements following such testing.

The circuitous and deadly-slow processing of data (following the introduction of a new client-bank communication system) at another financial institution may well have been the cause of their IT glitch. Previously, all communication between bank and customers had been more or less face-to-face. Alvicom could have helped them avoid these troubles in seconds flat.

Reduced tolerance

The scope of the IT sector has been growing so much over recent decades and it now has such an extensive socio-economical influence that the need to make it effective and reliable has never been so great. In one sense alone IT’s facilitating role has changed out of recognition: We have all become much less tolerant of failures and errors and this will only become more acute in the future under circumstances in which the stability and high levels of performance of IT systems become more and more critical to individuals and institutions.

Even though one of the really key concepts of today’s IT world is innovation, there is far greater focus on procedural security, provision of good service and reliability, all of these rank way ahead of revolutionary innovation. Of course, being innovative still has great value in the ever-unpredictable IT world, one whose face may well be unrecognizable even 5 or 10 years down the line. But make no mistake: testing will always be worth it. Clients don’t accept errors any more.

One of the main problems is that a culture of negativity has broken out amongst developers. In most projects, testing is seen at best as a necessary evil which might (or might not) be tagged on to the end of the process as a kind of final litmus test and far too often, testing is skipped altogether when deadlines are approaching too fast. Teams are delivering any old package at any price and the market is not always fussy.

Of course, there is no such thing as perfect testing; one just has to try to find a balance between reducing system weaknesses as best one can and the economic restraints which prevail. In Hungary, it’s not just a difficulty getting that balance right but also it seems that testers simply don’t ‘speak the same language’ any more – the sector is teetering at the top of a new Tower of Babel.

And yet there are standards, the observance of which consolidates both raw skill and raw ability and specialization in one’s work ought not to lead to a state in which testing, planning and development may be seen as all one and the same.

Tester training courses at Alvicom

With this in mind, Alvicom began in 2009 to provide training courses in software testing, all fully accredited by the Hungarian Software-Testing Board. These take place at the IQSOFT-John Bryce training centre.

These courses are of particular value since Alvicom, as a company, has made a name for itself at home and abroad with over a decade’s dedication to software testing services. These courses will prepare students for the internationally renowned Certified Tester Foundation Level (CT-FL) exam as offered by the International Software Testing and Qualification Board (ISTQB).

The courses are ideally aimed (amongst others) at:

Software engineers, Developers, Development Team Leaders, Testers, Testing Team Leaders, QA Engineers, Testing and Quality/Development co-ordinators, Systems Administrators and IT decision-makers in general.

On this/these course(s) students will learn about: Testing methodology, the integration and positioning of testing within a software development life-cycle, practical aspects of the building of a test environment, successful use of testing tools and insights into the limitations of the role and range of tasks which are relevant to testing. For further information about these courses please visit www.alvicom.hu