History is full of unsinkable ships.
The further our technology advances, the more “unsinkable” our ships appear to be. Software bugs however, (or icebergs, in our thin metaphor), are not a passive force. They adapt, evolve, and attack. Every week new stories emerge of software failing across a myriad of industries; sparking chaos, halting business, or even costing lives.
The difference between the Titanic and our “unsinkable ships” (enterprises) of today however, is the relative size of the problem. The cubic feet of the iceberg that tore open the infamous ship is huge in comparison to the size of a software bug. And yet that software bug can tear open an enterprise to the media just as effectively.
Software failure is a bad thing. A software bug causes multidimensional damage. As a user, you might only notice that something does not work – it may not be a big deal, but it is a nuisance. To the company however, your nuisance is a potentially catastrophic problem that affects not only a company’s product or service, but also their brand, reputation, and market value.
Tricentis’ Software Fail Watch: 2015 in Review, attempted catalogued the software bugs and failures that were big enough to gain media attention in 2015.
To do this they set news alerts for the phrases “software glitch“, “software bug“, and several common variants. All of the alerts were first sorted for relevance and uniqueness, then placed into one of six broad industry categories. Any statistics published in the news article were noted alongside each story, as well as external factors, such as whether the bug originated in a mobile app or posed the threat of physical injury.
Software Fail Watch: 2015 in Review makes it clear business risk should always be the base driver for your enterprise. Bugs have always existed in technology in some form, but as the complexity of enterprise environments grows, development accelerates, and release cycles shorten, a the public awareness of the software bug has only increased. With software failures being increasingly difficult to hide, a savvy enterprise should know that risk based software testing is a non-negotiable.
Read the full report here.
About The Author
Chelsea Frischknecht is a writer and social media strategist at Tricentis. Her most recent accomplishments include spearheading the Software Fail Watch: 2015 in Review that gathered news stories of software bugs from the entire year. Keep in touch on Twitter @Tricentis, or at www.tricentis.com/blog
