Like Pandora’s Box, sometimes bugs make it out into the real world, and things are never the same.  The damage, the publicity, and the root cause all become available for public consumption.  The goal here is not to point fingers (as we all know we might be the next victim).  The goal here is awareness, not just for QA but also for CIO types, alerting those in charge that defect risks are always ready to assert themselves, often in embarrassing ways and hopefully only during controlled tests.

These are glitches that occurred in the first week of June 1-7, 2017; three of those stories have stayed in the news: the British Airways IT system outage, the Bank of Philippines Islands unauthorized transfers and “Friday the 13th: The Game” progressive updates.  Here is just some of what’s happened since then in the rest of June, 2017, showing who/what it happened to, what happened, and comments on root cause/resolution.

  • BBC News at Ten, Huw Edwards was silently broadcast for 4 minutes, a “technical system crash” led to a switch to a backup system
  • Branchless bank (digital access only) Simple, about 5% of customers unable to view accounts or do transactions over weekend, engineering team resolved issue
  • Delhi Metro, commuter train delays, signaling affecting speed requiring manual override
  • Elite Airways, Portland International Jetport’s first international flight canceled due to a US/Canadian reservation system technical issue, all passengers refunded/rebooked and hope to launch on July 13
  • Kyle, Texas Police Department, dashcam footage data gets scrambled once stored, trying to purchase a better system
  • Longview, Texas, 3 out of 20 weather warning sirens stopped rotating 3 minutes into a 5 minute test then 1 siren failed to sound at next test, problems started after severe weather event damage
  • Melbourne, Australia, 590 false speed/red light false-positive tickets issued connected to 55 different cameras, 3 virus-infected drives have been identified and motorists will be refunded (at least 3 will need unrevoking of their licenses)
  • Philadelphia high schools, high seniors marked as deactivated in system, counselors went in day after end of school to manually reactivate so that transcripts could go out
  • Taiwan Air Force, 2 missiles veered off-course during a test, root cause: combustion problems
  • Tesco (Britain’s biggest supermarket), thousands of online orders cancelled, customers requested to re-arrange the delivery online and offered a £10 voucher in compensation
  • Tumblr’s new “Safe Mode”, overfiltering, filter confusion distinguishing Explicit from non-Explicit LGBTQ+-themed (Youtube addressed a similar problem back in April)
  • UK rail ticket machines, 3 hour of blockage to credit/debit card payments (“no online connectivity”), Rail Delivery Group is blaming software and systems provided by a named 3rd party