Software Testing Blog

Here in the United States, iPhone users have long complained about the quality of service from AT&T. Being the nation’s largest GSM carrier, AT&T was the logical first choice for the iPhone when it launched. Apple could reach a large population of Americans and then expand globally, all using the same device.

But AT&T has a mixed track record of keeping up with the demands of the iPhone. In some parts of the country, their service is great. In other parts, it’s pretty terrible. Many AT&T customers have long wanted to switch to America’s other big phone network: Verizon. The problem with Verizon is that it uses a completely different cellular phone standard called CDMA. Using the iPhone on Verizon required a different hardware design, and that was only after Apple got out of their exclusive deal with AT&T for selling the iPhone.

Today both Verizon and Apple finally delivered: the long awaited CDMA iPhone. Starting February 3, Verizon customers can start using the iPhone on America’s other big network. Are you planning to get a Verizon iPhone?

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Verizon owners will mostly have the same phone experience, but with a few small changes. Read more…

While social media is uber-important to us here at uTest, it plays a huge role when building any successful online community or crowdsourcing business model. The social web has led to a dramatic increase in online platforms that solve real business problems and enable social and business connections.

With all that in mind, uTest — along with HP, Dell, Microsoft, AT&T, FedEx, JetBlue, Samsung and others — was among the very first businesses to showcase their products on LinkedIn’s new Company Product Pages (launched yesterday 11/2/10).

LinkedIn has more than 80 million members worldwide and launched Company Pages to make it easier for businesses to engage with all these professionals with a dynamic, content-rich profile of record. In addition to product and service recommendations, businesses can display videos, featured product information and targeted ads on their Company Pages to drive engagement and interaction.

It’s still in the works, but check out our company services page here and recommend us if you feel inclined!
(And be sure to Follow Us On LinkedIn – it’s the only way into the ‘in crowd’ .)

What an honor it is to have tech giant Jeff Papows as this month’s guest for Testing the Limits. As the former President and CEO of Lotus Development Corporation, Jeff is widely credited with having taken Lotus Notes from its initial release to sales of over 70 million worldwide. Currently the CEO of WebLayers, Jeff’s career has also included stints as CEO of both Cognos Corporation and Maptuit. You can read more about his background here.

A frequent guest of CNN, Fox and other television networks, Jeff is also a successful author – having sold more than 80,00 copies of his first book “Enterprise.com: Information Leadership in the Digital Age.” In this interview, we ask Jeff about his latest book Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software in addition to other hot topics in the world of software quality. Check back tomorrow for Part II.

uTest: Let’s start from the beginning: What prompted you to write this book? Was it a bug that just made you snap one day, or did you reach a tipping point after years of observation?

JP: Well in the end, busy CEO’s write books when circumstances and industry trends pressure you to make a “complete” intellectual contribution to a big problem or trend that you feel compelled to respond to.  There are three issues at the root of a meta-level industry crisis I feel is mounting at present.

• Technology saturation or ubiquity – As of the first of this year we have a trillion devices connected to the Internet, a billion transistors and or microprocessors at work for literally every human being on the planet and thirty billion RFID tags in motion communications with our computing typologies.  Technology is not just a business to business staple anymore – it is truly part of the social fabric of the way we work and live.  With this kind of complexity curve and economic contribution any large scale disruption is monumental.

• Loss of intellectual capital – About 70% of the world’s application inventory and the platform for the majority of our transaction processing is written in Cobol and run on IBM mainframes.  The other side of the Dot Com bubble bursting is that graduating computer science majors and or math majors are off by about 37% and those that are graduating are interested and versed in Java, C++, etc. not Cobol.  Also, for the first time in our careers/lifetimes, C.S. engineers are retiring, aging and dying.  So how do we replace that codified knowledge from walking out our doors?

• Mergers & acquisitions – In the period following the financial downturn of 2008, the financial services sector has gone through a lot of consolidation.  The result is in part the added complexity of slamming together these complex back office systems in our major banks and financial institutions.

When you combine these factors together, the recipe is complete for the digital equivalent of the perfect storm.  To answer the question, that is why I wrote “Glitch”.

uTest: Your book deals with glitches and bugs from both ends of the spectrum – some serious, some funny and some that are almost unbelievable. What was the worst (as in most damaging) glitch that you came across while researching?

JP: That’s easy.  The human suffering and deaths caused by software glitches in Varions Cancer radiation medical equipment is the worst!

uTest: What was the worst glitch that didn’t make it into the book?

Read more…

So maybe it wasn’t AT&T’s fault after all.

Apple recently revealed that there is a fundamental flaw in their method for calculating how many signal bars to display.  And we have the iPhone 4 (and its “learn to hold your phone the right way” fiasco) to thank for bringing this software snafu to light.

CNN Money shares the following details from Apple:

“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple wrote in a statement posted on its website. “Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”

That means, for example, that iPhones sometimes display four bars when they should be displaying two. Apple said users reporting a significant drop in bars when they hold their iPhone 4 are probably in an area of “very weak signal strength” but were unaware of that because the phone displayed four to five bars.

“Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place,” the company said.

Perhaps most surprising, Apple disclosed that the problem is not confined to the iPhone 4.  The faulty formula has been present in every iPhone model since the 2007 original.  Questions remain about whether the issue is strictly software-related, or if it also involved hardware problems.  However, Apple has said it will release a free software update in the next several weeks to fix the glitch. It will use a new formula recommended by AT&T.

News has been all over the web the past few days about the AT&T and iPad security breach.  If you haven’t heard the details, in short a group of hackers discovered a vulnerability in AT&T’s private web APIs where one could send the ICC-ID from an iPad SIM card and AT&T’s servers would send back the corresponding owner’s email address – no authentication required. Since the ICC-IDs for the iPad are somewhat predictable, it was trivial for the hackers to send in thousands of semi-random guesses and collect any email addresses that came back. Some of those addresses were for people with addresses from domains like faa.gov and us.army.mil.

The hackers claim they reported the flaw to AT&T before sending their discovery to the fine folks at Gawker. AT&T, on the other hand, was not pleased to see their security problems appear in a popular tech blog at all, and had this to say in an email to their iPad customers:

On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service.

…

The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses.

So who’s to blame for a problem like this? Is it AT&T, or do the hackers themselves deserve some of the blame for the public way they handled their disclosure? Give us your thoughts below.

If you live in the United States and own and iPhone, chances are you’re aware that AT&T has some reliability issues.  As the sole mobile service provider for iPhones in the US, AT&T has seen their usage skyrocket and their reliability crumble in the past few years. Everyone has an opinion about why, but as of today AT&T has revealed what they see as one big problem: heavy bandwidth usage.

Starting this month, AT&T will now limit the amount of data an iPhone or iPad may consume in a given month.  The caps start at 200MB, but for an additional fee you can have all the way up to 2GB.  Existing users will continue to have an unlimited data plan for now, but new contracts will not have that option going forward.

AT&T says that 98% of their customers use less than 2GB of data per month, which means that most people won’t hit the top usage cap.  However, many people will still opt for the lower 200MB data cap because it will actually be cheaper than their current unlimited iPhone data plan.  That means software developers have an interesting new challenge on their hands – bandwidth optimization.

Read more…

Whenever you put a bunch of big brains with vast expertise about a still-evolving industry in the same room, you’re bound to get some interesting and impassioned debates.  Such was the case at Monday’s pre-conference sessions at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas. There were a number of excellent speakers representing the perspectives of OEMs like Nokia and LG; carriers like Verizon and AT&T; and content providers like Travelocity and MTV.

I sat in on several of these sessions and heard a number of important topics being discussed that will have major implications for the future of mobile apps and mobile commerce.  These debates included:

• Android vs. iPhone vs. Blackberry vs. Symbian
• Free vs. Paid apps
• OEM app stores vs. Carrier app stores

But perhaps the most interesting, fierce and recurring debate that I heard at CTIA was around the topic of… Read more…

Over in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress, 24 of the world’s leading wireless carriers and mobile OEMs announced their plans to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) — a unified platform which developers can use to build a mobile app once and have it run seamlessly on any handset, OS or carrier.  Among the impressive roster of backers are mobile heavyweights like AT&T, Verizon, Orange, LG and Sony.  Sounds like a utopia for mobile developers, right?  It could be… if it works.

There are more than a few skeptics, including Jason Kincaid (@jasonkincaid) over at TechCrunch.  As Kincaid states (with a bit of help from Google’s Andy Rubin):

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. Andy Rubin, Google VP of Engineering (and the man in charge of Android) has already shared his skepticism, saying, “There is always a dream that you could write [a program] once and [have it] run anywhere and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realised and I am sceptical that it ever will be“. To put it another way, this is a pipe dream from carriers looking to loosen Apple’s stranglehold over mobile applications and there’s very little chance that it’s going to work.

The reasons Kincaid thinks the WAC won’t work out include:

Read more…

Today Apple announced their much anticipated tablet computer – the iPad.  With a 9.7 inch screen, the iPad is a supersized iPhone; and it’s already inspiring both love and hate from Apple fans worldwide.  Comments so far have ranged from “I want it now” to “I was expecting a lot more than an XL version of the iPhone with no phone capabilities.”

So what does the iPad mean for developers, testers, and Apple users?  Here are a few thoughts:

Layout now matters for iPhone developers.
Up until now, an iPhone app was one size fits all.  Every iPhone has the same resolution, meaning apps didn’t have to worry about scaling up or down.  Not anymore!  The iPad is a larger device, but it runs the same iPhone apps.  While it can automatically scale up an app designed for the iPhone, the results are kind of ugly.  The bigger screen real estate opens a lot of interesting possibilities, but for iPhone developers now is the time you need to start worrying about how your app will look on a larger screen that isn’t 480×320.

New interface means new challenges.
If it’s not enough that the iPad comes in a different size, now developers will also have a slew of new interface widgets to work with.  Whether or not those widgets will be available on the iPhone remains to be seen, but whatever the case developers will have their hands full making sure their apps look correct on each platform.

Testers needed!
Read more…

Bug-iversary Alert! Tomorrow is the 20-year anniversary of the “crash” of the AT&T Long Distance Network. On January 15, 1990 faulty software was installed on the AT&T Electronic Switching System (Number 4 ESS): a one-line bug incapacitated the entire system, disabling switches throughout half the network.

Known as one of the most serious telecom bugs in history, more than 75 million calls were not connected during 9 hours, an estimated $60 million loss.

Dennis Burke of California Polytechnic said it best: “The Jan. 1990 incident showed how bugs in self-healing software can bring down healthy systems, and the difficulty of detecting obscure load- and time-dependent defects in software.”

Speaking of “load defects,” AT&T — after signing up to be exclusive U.S. provider of iPhone service — has recently come under fire for the quality of its network coverage. Businessweek‘s top headlines read:

• An AT&T Mystery: Abrupt New York iPhone Shutdown
• AT&T Mulls Plans to Deal with iPhone Data Demand
• Can AT&T Meet iPhone Network Demands?

In light of this bug-iversary, I can’t help but wonder if more testing should have been done before AT&T took on the massive data demands of modern 3G smartphones? What do you think?