Eggplant Blog

According to a research report by CB Insights, The Challenger Bank Playbook, “Challenger banks first made in-roads with consumers who lost faith in institutional firms following the global financial crisis.”  

Deloitte’s annual Holiday Survey of Consumers found that online is king when it comes to the 2019 holiday shopping season. According to the report, consumers of all ages are more likely to rely on Cyber Monday than Black Friday and expect to spend nearly 60% of their holiday budget online. Given eCommerce’s popularity these findings aren’t terribly surprising, however, they underscore that online retailers cannot afford any downtime or performance glitches when Cyber Monday dawns.

In the highly competitive trading environment, instant access to market information is the ultimate end game.  

“The collapse of Thomas Cook, one of the most high-profile company failures in the history of the travel industry, will be pored over by analysts for years to come.” This according to an article by PhocusWire’s Kevin May but it’s a sentiment shared by countless other media members, Thomas Cook employees, and the 150,000 people stranded by the company’s disintegration.

It’s a digital world and changing consumer and user demands necessitate that websites, apps and programs deliver an experience that delights users. Those companies that can’t deliver on these expectations risk poor customer satisfaction scores, low adoption rates, negative brand perception and loss of revenue. These factors are giving rise to a new phenomenon in software testing which we’ve termed “continuous everything,” comprised of three essential areas—continuous quality, continuous delivery and continuous feedback.  

There are certain inalienable truths about businesses: they all want to succeed and they all want to beat their competitors. What's slightly different is how a business defines success. For a healthcare company, it might be lives saved. For an insurance company, it's the number of policies bought. For an e-commerce retailer, it's shopping basket conversions. 

Testing is critical for organizations like NASA, the US Army, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, MBDA, the UK’s Ministry of Defense and the Metropolitan and Scottish Police, where lives are on the line. As we've worked with customers like these over many years, we've noticed how much more testing is than just making sure the system works — it’s about ensuring we test for mission success and continuously optimize mission outcomes. Whether you're designing systems for command and control (C2); to provide support for complex police operations, such as hostage negotiations; or for shooting down an enemy missile, you should plan your testing and monitoring strategy to continuously test against the desired mission outcomes. 

Quality assurance (QA) used to be a compliance activity. You were releasing a product and needed to test it and stamp it “approved.” QA was about testing that the code worked. You might manually test the code. You might have even tried some automation — coding a set of test scripts that would try to capture regressions or errors that you had eradicated in the past, but which somehow crept back in. All in all, you were reasonably satisfied that you achieved a level of test coverage that met your goals. Then, you put your code into production and crossed your fingers that nothing went wrong. And if it did, you tried to fix it as quickly as humanly possible.

It used to be that software testers could test their applications on just one platform, and only have to worry about testing that the code worked.

For a while now (about 10 years), Dev and Ops have been trying to get along. After all, collaboration between the two creates fast feedback loops and gets high-quality software into users’ hands faster. But with a new space emerging, digital experience management, Dev and Ops need to make a new BFF—the business—to stay in sync.