Titanic software testing goofs

CIO.com recently published a hip article entitled “Stupid QA Tricks: Colossal Software Testing Oversights“, which examines five particularly egregious lapses perpetrated by IT organizations. Software mistakes, defects, and collapses occur, most likely, hourly across the globe, however, two of the five mentioned in the article are specifically worth noting for their direct interdependence with business revenue.

Because it’s my bag, I have often found that while practically every business executive will claim that quality is “job #1″, very few actually mean it when it comes to money and resources. Even the article rhetorically muses:

with IT infused in every aspect of business, doesn’t it pay to take quality assurance seriously?

What’s more, man, I’m sure each of the five companies did (and certainly now do) take quality assurance “seriously”, but apparently not serious enough. Take, for instance, J Crew, which suffered such a catastrophic software upgrade, causing the company to recently announce 3rd quarter income

was down 12% from the year-ago quarter to $18.1 million. J. Crew also lowered its per-share earnings guidance for the year to $1.44 to $1.54 from $1.70 to $1.75. The culprit was a project to upgrade the software it uses to process orders from its Web site that went astray, the company said.

Not only did the nefarious upgrade whack the company’s market capitalization, but they

spent about $3 million in the just-completed quarter to fix the problem

Clearly, there is an expensive lesson to be learned — that is, quality assurance is a lot more than verifying applications work– it’s about making sure the entire copasetic process works. Thankfully this lesson was on J Crew’s dollar and not yours, right?

Not to be outdone, though, by J Crew, the article goes on to profile a financial services firm that mistakingly sent private financial statements to incorrect addresses resulting in a loss of

nearly $450 million in managed assets

Yes, you read that correctly, they lost almost half a billion dollars in assets, which is essentially how financial institutions of this sort measure themselves. I’m sure more than one person lost their job over this faux pas.

Given these two noteworthy gaffs, what’s the big lesson? Simple– quality assurance is more than finding defects in code– it’s about ensuring the process of taking concepts and turning them into cash works. Don’t get me wrong, a large part of that process is making sure a code base contains as few defects as possible– but that focus can often neglect other issues that present risks; for example, deployments. Do you think the J Crew team had an effective roll-back strategy? Apparently not, otherwise the issue would have been a small hiccup and not a market altering event, man.

Don’t let the Titanic happen to you– icebergs (i.e. upgrades, deployments, misunderstandings, etc) will undoubtedly get in your way. It’s up to your process and how it addresses quality that’ll be the difference between striking the iceberg and safely avoiding it. For even though the Titanic might have been faultily constructed, it wouldn’t have sunk if it didn’t hit the iceberg.

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