Recently in Failures Category

These days on TV you cannot change a channel without seeing a commercial for the new AT&T.  Cingular now is the new AT&T.  On the news one evening the speculation is a number of companies are reverting back to names in their minds that people trust.  Everyone should trust AT&T they have been around forever right?  Well, I'm going to spin a little tale about them.  Last Friday I opened my cell phone to make a call and noticed that on the display were it used to state "Cingular", it now read "Unregistered SIM".  Sounds like a problem doesn't it?

So, I called my wife who works in the financial community within ITS to ask if my bill was paid.  She asked someone and as it turns out, no one has received any bills for me.  Ah the plot thickens.  BTW, in this story I will not use real names of people because I do not have their permission to do so.  So with the weekend and other things coming up, I did not get around to doing anything about it until yesterday.

I started the exchange with a phone call to someone in the know regarding cellular around here.  She conferenced me in with the new AT&T.  They tried to look my phone number up and could not find it in their system because it was disconnected.  Now from a design perspective wouldn't you expect a database system to have the ability to pull the history up on a key data element the phone number?  To me that seems to be a primary key.  Well, they needed the contract, which with some digging on our end, we were able to provide.  Using that to search they were able to find out that they turned my phone off on Friday.  Duh!  I already that.  The whole reason this was caused was they mailed a bill to Penn State back in March.  Where they do not know.  The person who received that bill not knowing me, did not pay it.  So Cingular, the new AT&T put Penn State in for collection.  They gave no notice about my service, they just turned it out.  Somewhere in the data flow, you would have expected that they would contact the people holding the contract and say, "hey you did not pay so we are going to turn the phone off".  Seems like basic customer service things to me, but hey what do I know.

So the call continues (total time 2 hours), and then we find out that billing can be fixed.  Yeah!  However there is bad news they wanted to assign me a new phone number.  What?  As it seems they gave my current number to a grad student.  Let's see service turned off on Friday, number re-assignment on Monday.  Something just doesn't seem right here, what do you think?  I did not want a new number, people have been calling me at my number for years.  Heck its even on my business cards.  So the new AT&T recognized that forcing me to change wasn't going to happen.  So they contacted the grad student and told her she would change.  I'm feeling better now, because I thought my phone would just work.  Oh no, because the phone was turned off, my SIM card was dead.  So they were going to make things right for me and provide me with a new SIM card.

So, over lunch I walk to the local AT&T store.  I explained my situation and they provided me with the new SIM card.  They even copied the data off of my old one.  Problem solve!  Boy was I wrong.  On the walk back up, I decided to call my wife to let her know what happened.  She answered the phone in an extremely formal way.  She told me that her caller id was showing the name of the Grad Student.  What!@$@@#  In addition, my voice mail was gone.  At this point in the game I was livid.  So when I returned to my office, I tested things out and yes my name was gone along with my voice mail.  I send out another email about this and later in the day I received a call from the new AT&T.  They told me that it was a simple fix that involved an IT Guy.  Interesting statement these days.  I hear this one a lot.  I think its big companies attempts to make the user feel somewhat important because they need central IT.  Big deal, they need to fix their problem, I do not need to know why.  Most users even the technical ones really do not care about the long decision making progress a vendor goes through to solve their problem.  They just want it solved quickly.  So back to my story...  Later in the day my phone was fixed.  However because of the phone number switch, I still receive phone calls for the grad student.

I am putting this story in the failures category because it really is a perfect example of a failure on a number of fronts:

• Whoever received that bill back in March, should have acted on it somehow.  If I receive a bill for someone in error, I return it to them.  Its a bill and probably needs to be paid.
• The AT&T system, without looking at it is a failure too.  Come on, if you have a key field like a phone number, you cannot see all of the things associated with it.
• The re-assignment of my number.  Now that was just too quick.  Also, would you not expect someone as big as the new AT&T contacting the user to say, "hey you did not pay so we are turning off your service". 
  
• Getting an IT guy.  Like I really care and the same thing goes for our users.  I want the problem solved, I could care less how its solved.

 

Your software is buggy.  We had a software failure which caused the outage.  A glitch in the software caused the accident.  All of these quotes are pretty commonplace these days, when it comes to discussions about failures.  Wikipedia defines "a software bug (or "bug") is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect result)."  An incorrect result, could be something as minor as a video game locking up or as major as people dying due to an over-exposure of radiation during an X-Ray.  All of these failures are significant in their own way.

What are some of the common causes that lead to software failures:

• Bad or incorrect design.  An example of this would be a failure on the part of the developer not understanding the user's requirements, which then is turned into bad design.
• Failure to translated the design to code.  This statement pretty much says it all.  The developer has a design that meets the user's requirements, but when it comes time to code he/she makes glaring errors in writing the code.
• Inadequate testing.  Need I say more on this one?  Well I think I will, this could cover simple things like not making sure the test cases satisfy the requirements.  Poor test coverage and the list could go on and on.
• Failure to integrate properly - See any of the above for examples of problems related to this.

Like I stated above, these are only some of the reasons we have failures.  As software continues to become more complex, the probability of software failing also increases.  This is just a common fact of life in Information Technology.  You are probably going to guess how you can limit the amount of failures based on my previous posts.  And yes, you are correct.  Having a software process can really limit the amount of failures/bugs/glitches and so on that your software has.