Forever 21 recently made headlines after filing for bankruptcy and announcing plans to close as many as 350 stores. The move is the latest in a series of seemingly successful brick and mortar retailers admitting defeat in the face of omnichannel trends—JCPenney, Abercrombie & Fitch, Kmart and Sears are just a few of the big-name brands to announce significant store closings in 2019.
Eggplant Blog
Eggplant held its inaugural Eggplanet Conference this week in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). We had hundreds of attendees from around the world, from all sorts of different companies. Attendees were encouraged that QA Testers were needed more than ever in the age of AI. They were empowered to be the change in their organizations and put their Customers at the center of their universe. They felt energized that they were a key part of the future of QA!
Today is an exciting day for the Eggplant Family. Professionals, Teachers, and Students, all of us Software Users, gather together in Philadelphia at the inaugural Eggplanet US conference. People working in Government, Banking, Healthcare, Retail, and Higher Education will share stories, best practices, and experiences. Everyone teaching, listening, and learning in pursuit of a central goal: to rid the world of bad software.
Over the next four years, Gartner predicts that 25 percent of employees will use voice to interact with applications in the workplace—up from less than 2 percent in 2019.
Automated Testing is a requirement if your organization is going to do DevOps at scale. Testing is too vast and complex to be done by humans without support.
There is always a fine line between managing the costs of an Automated Testing Team and ensuring that the organization is seeing a return on its investment. Automated Testing, regardless of if you are using a licensed or open-source testing tool, has hidden costs. The license costs are just the most obvious.
In late July, news broke that researchers at Armis Labs had identified numerous vulnerabilities in an operating system known as VxWorks, leaving approximately 200 million devices vulnerable. Unfamiliar with VxWorks? You’re not alone—as Ben Seri, VP of research at Armis put it, “VxWorks is the most widely used operating system you may have never heard of.”
A recent article by InformationWeek’s Jessica Davis proclaimed, “RPA is the fastest growing category of software today, driven by enterprise digital transformation efforts.” Davis went on to cite a Gartner report which found RPA has year-over-year growth of 63 percent, which it attributes to “an expensive patchwork quilt of applications and systems” that companies are struggling to manage.
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.
On June 18, many Google Calendar users worldwide got an unexpected surprise when logging into the app—an error message. The issue was resolved approximately three hours later but, as anyone who lives and dies by their calendar knows, three hours is plenty of time to wreak scheduling havoc. The same day, restaurant chain Taco Bell also made headlines for tech issues, when heavy traffic in response to its free Taco giveaway caused the app to crash.
The trends from the last several years are clear: Retailers are reaping the rewards by providing an Omni-Channel experience on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. According to CNBC, Cyber Monday in 2018 experienced a 19.3% Year on Year increase in Sales with a record $7.9 billion while retailers pulled in $6.22 billion and a further $3.7 billion in sales on Black Friday and Thanksgiving respectively.