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I’m new to uTest – just started at the beginning of January. But even so, I can’t help but already look at the world through a uTest lens. Last week, for instance, I saw the news that the FAA had grounded Boeing’s new flagship 787 due to lithium ion battery fires both in the air and at the gate. United was forced to ground all six of the 787s they have in service – costing them a fortune.
Here is the story from The Verge:
Yesterday’s decision by the Federal Aviation Administration to ground all US-based Boeing 787s — the crown jewel in Boeing’s commercial aviation product portfolio — is unquestionably an alarming one: it halts the most advanced airliner ever designed from carrying passengers until Boeing can get to the bottom of lithium ion battery fires that have disrupted one flight and left another aircraft smoking at the gate. United, which owns all six of the US 787s currently in service, will be forced to cancel a number of international routes or backfill them with other aircraft until the situation is resolved — and in all likelihood, aviation authorities in other countries around the world will follow suit.
By all appearances, it’s a troubled start for one of the most ambitious airliners since the dawn of the jet age, beleaguered by cost overruns, delays, and a list of incidents that seems to be growing by the day. Will Boeing need to write down the $30-plus billion in research and development that it took to get to this point? Can the Dreamliner ultimately be a safe way to fly?
What does this have to do with software testing? Software developers are extremely lucky in one way – they can, unlike Boeing, make changes and update an application after release. And software, in most cases, isn’t a matter of life or death.
But software bugs still have a cost – a cost in terms of customers and a cost in terms of brand. Today, app developers really only have one shot to impress a customer, particularly in the realm of mobile apps. If the app crashes, that customer is gone – and likely never to return.
Software developers have one more advantage over Boeing – they have the opportunity to test their applications in-the-wild to get a real sense of how their applications behave in the real world. And Boeing is a case study in another way: nothing you do in the confines of the lab can prepare you for the real world.
For Boeing , they don’t have a choice. For software developers, they’d be silly to not to protect themselves.
