1.What is 'Software Quality Assurance'?
Software QA involves the entire software development Process -
monitoring and improving the process, making sure that any agreed-upon
standards and procedures are followed, and ensuring that problems are
found and dealt with. It is oriented to 'prevention'. (See the Books
section for a list of useful books on Software Quality Assurance.)
2.What is 'Software Testing'?
Testing involves operation of a system or application under
controlled conditions and evaluating the results (eg, 'if the user is
in interface A of the application while using hardware B, and does C,
then D should happen'). The controlled conditions should include both
normal and abnormal conditions. Testing should intentionally attempt to
make things go wrong to determine if things happen when they shouldn't
or things don't happen when they should. It is oriented to 'detection'.
Organizations vary considerably in how they assign
responsibility for QA and testing. Sometimes they're the combined
responsibility of one group or individual. Also common are project
teams that include a mix of testers and developers who work closely
together, with overall QA processes monitored by project managers. It
will depend on what best fits an organization's size and business
structure.
3. What are some recent major computer system failures caused by software bugs?
* Media reports in January of 2005 detailed severe problems
with a $170 million high-profile U.S. government IT systems project.
Software testing was one of the five major problem areas according to a
report of the commission reviewing the project. Studies were under way
to determine which, if any, portions of the project could be salvaged.
* In July 2004 newspapers reported that a new government
welfare management system in Canada costing several hundred million
dollars was unable to handle a simple benefits rate increase after
being put into live operation. Reportedly the original contract allowed
for only 6 weeks of acceptance testing and the system was never tested
for its ability to handle a rate increase.
* Millions of bank accounts were impacted by errors due to
installation of inadequately tested software code in the transaction
processing system of a major North American bank, according to mid-2004
news reports. Articles about the incident stated that it took two weeks
to fix all the resulting errors, that additional problems resulted when
the incident drew a large number of e-mail phishing attacks against the
bank's customers, and that the total cost of the incident could exceed
$100 million.
* A bug in site management software utilized by companies with
a significant percentage of worldwide web traffic was reported in May
of 2004. The bug resulted in performance problems for many of the sites
simultaneously and required disabling of the software until the bug was
fixed.
* According to news reports in April of 2004, a software bug
was determined to be a major contributor to the 2003 Northeast
blackout, the worst power system failure in North American history. The
failure involved loss of electrical power to 50 million customers,
forced shutdown of 100 power plants, and economic losses estimated at
$6 billion. The bug was reportedly in one utility company's
vendor-supplied power monitoring and management system, which was
unable to correctly handle and report on an unusual confluence of
initially localized events. The error was found and corrected after
examining millions of lines of code.
* In early 2004, news reports revealed the intentional use of
a software bug as a counter-espionage tool. According to the report, in
the early 1980's one nation surreptitiously allowed a hostile nation's
espionage service to steal a version of sophisticated industrial
software that had intentionally-added flaws. This eventually resulted
in major industrial disruption in the country that used the stolen
flawed software.
* A major U.S. retailer was reportedly hit with a large
government fine in October of 2003 due to web site errors that enabled
customers to view one anothers' online orders.
* News stories in the fall of 2003 stated that a manufacturing
company recalled all their transportation products in order to fix a
software problem causing instability in certain circumstances. The
company found and reported the bug itself and initiated the recall
procedure in which a software upgrade fixed the problems.
* In January of 2001 newspapers reported that a major European
railroad was hit by the aftereffects of the Y2K bug. The company found
that many of their newer trains would not run due to their inability to
recognize the date '31/12/2000'; the trains were started by altering
the control system's date settings.
* News reports in September of 2000 told of a software vendor
settling a lawsuit with a large mortgage lender; the vendor had
reportedly delivered an online mortgage processing system that did not
meet specifications, was delivered late, and didn't work.
* In early 2000, major problems were reported with a new
computer system in a large suburban U.S. public school district with
100,000+ students; problems included 10,000 erroneous report cards and
students left stranded by failed class registration systems; the
district's CIO was fired. The school district decided to reinstate it's
original 25-year old system for at least a year until the bugs were
worked out of the new system by the software vendors.
* In October of 1999 the $125 million NASA Mars Climate
Orbiter spacecraft was believed to be lost in space due to a simple
data conversion error. It was determined that spacecraft software used
certain data in English units that should have been in metric units.
Among other tasks, the orbiter was to serve as a communications relay
for the Mars Polar Lander mission, which failed for unknown reasons in
December 1999. Several investigating panels were convened to determine
the process failures that allowed the error to go undetected.
* Bugs in software supporting a large commercial high-speed
data network affected 70,000 business customers over a period of 8 days
in August of 1999. Among those affected was the electronic trading
system of the largest U.S. futures exchange, which was shut down for
most of a week as a result of the outages.
* January 1998 news reports told of software problems at a
major U.S. telecommunications company that resulted in no charges for
long distance calls for a month for 400,000 customers. The problem went
undetected until customers called up with questions about their bills.
4.Why is it often hard for management to get serious about quality assurance?
* Solving problems is a high-visibility process; preventing
problems is low-visibility. This is illustrated by an old parable: In
ancient China there was a family of healers, one of whom was known
throughout the land and employed as a physician to a great lord.
5.Why does software have bugs?
* Miscommunication or no communication - as to specifics of
what an application should or shouldn't do (the application's
requirements).
* Software complexity - the complexity of current software
applications can be difficult to comprehend for anyone without
experience in modern-day software development. Multi-tiered
applications, client-server and distributed applications, data
communications, enormous relational databases, and sheer size of
applications have all contributed to the exponential growth in
software/system complexity.
* Programming errors - programmers, like anyone else, can make mistakes.
* Changing requirements (whether documented or undocumented) -
the end-user may not understand the effects of changes, or may
understand and request them anyway - redesign, rescheduling of
engineers, effects on other projects, work already completed that may
have to be redone or thrown out, hardware requirements that may be
affected, etc. If there are many minor changes or any major changes,
known and unknown dependencies among parts of the project are likely to
interact and cause problems, and the complexity of coordinating changes
may result in errors. Enthusiasm of engineering staff may be affected.
In some fast-changing business environments, continuously modified
requirements may be a fact of life. In this case, management must
understand the resulting risks, and QA and test engineers must adapt
and plan for continuous extensive testing to keep the inevitable bugs
from running out of control - see 'What can be done if requirements are
changing continuously?' in Part 2 of the FAQ. Also see information
about 'agile' approaches such as XP, also in Part 2 of the FAQ.
* Time pressures - scheduling of software projects is
difficult at best, often requiring a lot of guesswork. When deadlines
loom and the crunch comes, mistakes will be made.
* egos - people prefer to say things like:
* * 'no problem'
* * 'piece of cake'
* * 'I can whip that out in a few hours'
* * 'it should be easy to update that old code'
* instead of:
* * 'that adds a lot of complexity and we could end up making a lot of mistakes'
* * 'we have no idea if we can do that; we'll wing it'
* * 'I can't estimate how long it will take, until I take a close look at it'
* * 'we can't figure out what that old spaghetti code did in the first place'
If there are too many unrealistic 'no problem's', the result is bugs.
* Poorly documented code - it's tough to maintain and modify
code that is badly written or poorly documented; the result is bugs. In
many organizations management provides no incentive for programmers to
document their code or write clear, understandable, maintainable code.
In fact, it's usually the opposite: they get points mostly for quickly
turning out code, and there's job security if nobody else can
understand it ('if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read').
* Software development tools - visual tools, class libraries,
compilers, scripting tools, etc. often introduce their own bugs or are
poorly documented, resulting in added bugs.
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