At present, when the market presses software companies to develop more complex and sophisticated projects in shorter than ever timeframes, the importance of high-quality and effective test process cannot be underestimated. Plenty companies were forced out of the market because of their failure to deliver high quality products under tight deadlines. Most of the cases, this failure was caused by a too slow testing process.
Here are just a few examples of huge problems generated by software bugs:
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.
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.
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.
In April of 1999 a software bug caused the failure of a $1.2 billion military satellite launch, the costliest unmanned accident in the history of Cape Canaveral launches. The failure was the latest in a string of launch failures, triggering a complete military and industry review of U.S. space launch programs, including software integration and testing processes.
A small town in Illinois received an unusually large monthly electric bill of $7 million in March of 1999. This was about 700 times larger than it's normal bill. It turned out to be due to bugs in new software that had been purchased by the local power company to deal with Y2K software issues.
In early 1999 a major computer game company recalled all copies of a popular new product due to software problems. The company made a public apology for releasing a product before it was ready.
In August of 1997 one of the leading consumer credit reporting companies reportedly shut down their new public web site after less than two days of operation due to software problems. The new site allowed web site visitors instant access, for a small fee, to their personal credit reports. However, a number of initial users ended up viewing each others' reports instead of their own, resulting in irate customers and nationwide publicity. The problem was attributed to "...unexpectedly high demand from consumers and faulty software that routed the files to the wrong computers."
Software bugs caused the bank accounts of 823 customers of a major U.S. bank to be credited with $924,844,208.32 each in May of 1996, according to newspaper reports. The American Bankers Association claimed it was the largest such error in banking history.
The Popular e-Business ideology means quicker company response to the market needs. However, at present we face a new era of new business approach, known as m-Business (business model based on mobile telecommunications ) that raises the race to even higher levels. This new approach means that you entrust even more information and tasks to probably unstable and buggy software; hence customers' concern about quality increases. So, if you want to create winning software product you should pay special attention to testing. You need a good testing plan to ensure a successful and cost-effective testing.
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