About testing and risk management in software development
On vacation, my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra offered to roll out a new firmware update of the phone and upgrade to One UI 5 (Android 13). I've been totally refreshed for a day and I've been enjoying the new interface. (old-fashioned). Then I used the phone for about a day: I went with my family to Legoland, visited the water park there and returned home. Since the phone was almost discharged, I put it on charging, and removed the brick from charging, this brick was still working, but the screen was exclusively black and showed no signs of life. I decided to Google what the attack was and it became clear that this is a fairly standard story with the upgrade of Samsung phones to One UI. 5I don’t think any of this helps to bring the screen back to life. Now to the subject of the post.
- Testing. It seems logical that the thoroughness of testing should be determined by how large the size of the problems due to poor quality testing. In the case of turning the phone into a brick, it seems that the problem is really significant, since the phone is an important part of people’s lives. For example, people use their phone to navigate, pay, get information – it’s unpleasant to be in an unfamiliar city without a phone. In addition, I have applications tied to my phone for a second factor, such as Google Authenticator, and I also have a mobile bank there, which also comes with flies for authentication. As a result, I can’t use work email without a work phone, which is a big problem for me.
As a result, I’m not at all sure that the guys at Samsung were normally testing their update and considering scenarios with problems that arise not immediately after the update, but after a day when connecting to the charger. Plus, as I realized, the guys did not implement a normal rollback to the previous working state. Plus it's not clear this problem is purely at the level of software or software leads to damage to the screen itself and then hello screen replacement... which will help for one day when the new screen will also be killed by our software. All in all, we may have a small bug in the software that leads to the phone being blocked, plus it’s not even clear if it’s worth repairing.
- Risk management When Samsung pointed out to me that the phone could be upgraded, I still thought a little bit about whether or not to update it right away, but wait to get back from vacation. But, in the end, I decided that nothing terrible can happen because the phone has been updated many times and everything was fine. But this inductive logic doesn’t work very well with turkey and Thanksgiving and didn’t work very well here, and I have a hypothesis that this is somehow related to the fact that my phone is approaching its two-year anniversary and maybe someone at Samsung decided that it’s time to update it. In general, next time I will consider the risks better and overestimate the likelihood of problems due to software updates in the firmware of my phone.
P.S. Now I'm sitting there and suddenly I'm choosing which phone I should buy to replace the one I dropped out.
#Quality #QualityAssurance #RiskManagement