import test blog

In banking, digital technology is in the process of changing customer relations as mobile technology and the Internet continues to place more and more control in the hands of consumers. Fortunately, some financial institutions are recognizing and embracing this change.

Analytics has now become a major tool in providing financial institutions with the means of relating to customers in a profitable way. The mix of data gathered in real time from mobile devices and social media can now be combined with legacy information to provide a comprehensive picture, of customer behavior and attitudes, that was never possible before. This creates the possibility of new products, new ways to approach established and potential customers, and the creation of new business models.

Banks already have a great deal of legacy information at their disposal. Combining this with new information creates a Big Data resource that enables banks to understand customers in ways that enhance customer relations and make new financial products possible.

The old fashioned system of data silos is changing as the integration of information is moving business, including banking, from a one-dimensional approach to customer relations into a multi-dimensional relationship where business becomes a participating member of the decision-making process. Of course, this will require even greater reliance on digital technology and a number of banks are already laying the foundations for expansion by embracing IT.

In the future, predictive analytics will make it possible to predict when customers will want to make major purchases, thus enabling financial institutions to place the right financial product in front of the right customer at the right time. The only danger in this new approach is that banks risk sounding like salesmen when they should sound like dignified and reliable financial institutions. But, if this is done with propriety and respect for the customer, then there is no reason why customers should not regard such offers as information that adds value to their lives.

Those with the gold want a “free market” Internet which they define as an unregulated marketplace. That is, you can charge what you want for whatever you want, including giving privileged positions on the Internet to those who pay more.

Government, or rather certain governments in the World, would like to rein in free speech and are very annoyed by the egalitarian quality of the Internet and would like to use it as a propaganda tool, while other governments treat the Internet as an outlet of free speech and work to protect net neutrality.

The problem is that net neutrality means different things to different people. To some, the term means that all information and all websites should be treated equally by all concerned, including network access suppliers, businesses and government. While others view the term to mean that the Internet should be treated as an unregulated marketplace only, and that not allowing providers to charge whatever they want will lower competition and stifle investment. They also fear that any government regulation is an open door to ever increasing regulations. This is the classic “slippery slope” argument. Then there are the rest of us who would simply like to retain the unfettered Internet that we've come to rely on and enjoy. The irony is that everyone is right, sort of, and no one is right completely.

The reality is that protecting the Internet from monopolistic practices encourages startups to use the Internet as a launch point for their products and services, because they don't have to pay large chunks of money just to get access to higher speeds.

Ultimately it comes down to striking a balance that allows for a truly free market where everybody at least has a chance and the big guy can't ride over the little guy. Achieving that requires at least some regulation, or the vast potential for startups and the promise of the Internet marketplace will decay and fade away. No one, not even the free market economists, want that.

One of the big advances is the addition of System UT Tuner which allows people to customise Quick Settings to the layout that is most comfortable for them. Another improvement is the ability to uninstall apps directly from the home screen. There is even an option to choose between removing the application entirely or just removing the icon from the home screen. Also, Google Now is easier to access and you don't need to leave the app you're on to reach it.

Google also offers Android Pay. This application enables people to make a purchase with a single tap, without the need to open an application, while fingerprint scanner support enables secure authorisation.

Another big improvement is the ability to individually grant or deny app permissions. This helps keep personal data personal as you no longer need to grant access to data you want to remain confidential. You can also grant or withhold new permissions when an app makes a request.

Sending files, photos or links has now become easier as Android M will add your contacts to a share menu creating an interface similar to a speed dial list.

The easy to use sliders for volume control and USB Type C support rounds out what promises to be a much improved operating system. If Google follows its usual pattern, we can expect the release of Android M somewhere around October or November. That's something to look forward to.

While the name of the software has yet to be announced, speculation is high regarding what dulcet delicacy it will be named after, with Milkshake being the frontrunner and Marshmallow a close runner up.

It’s important to recruit testers who have a good track record and are obviously people who know what they are doing. Can they hit the ground running as testers or do they need all the documentation before they will move? Can they code? A tester who doesn’t understand coding may be fine for UX testing, but not bug finding. Such testers can’t really comprehend the implications of any bugs found and so lack the imagination to explore the application and find other problems.

You should also recruit a variety of testers. This will make testing in various scenarios more easy and make bug finding and the resolution of critical issues more productive. Spread your testing team across different demographics and different environments.

All system requirements should be thoroughly documented. Failure to document can lead to testers not having the correct operating system or hardware, or the appropriate drivers not being installed. Poor documentation can cost time and money, and may even delay release.

Make sure you have the proper security in place before distributing your software to any testers who are not directly part of your organization. Have license and non-disclosure agreements ready as well as whatever other measures, like built in self-destruct to prevent your software from being pirated or leaking out. Also make sure that your software will not be blocked by anti-virus programs if it requires the Internet in order to function.

Of course, there is one thing you should never do and that is to release an application with known bugs. Buggy software should not be released to testers as it interferes with testing and inhibits finding critical issues. And untested or buggy software should never be released to the general public, no matter how close to the release date you might be. This turns the public into beta testers and can result in lost revenue and bad public relations. These problems usually result from not enough development and functional testing time, so make sure there is enough time for both.

Use different beta testers for different releases. This avoids testers becoming jaded and getting careless with programs they have “seen before.” It also gives you a fresh set of eyes that can look at your application anew.  

Basically, successful beta testing is based on good organization, that enables testing to be done smoothly, and good planning that enables testing to operate in a favorable environment. Given these elements, and enough time, your beta testing will be successful.

On Sunday, September 16, the Denver Broncos were trailing the Oakland Raiders 19-17 in the fourth quarter. Pulling off a win was a long shot, but New Jersey gambler Anthony Prince placed a $110 bet on the Broncos at the FanDuel Sportsbook over the counter at the Meadowlands Racetrack. When the Broncos completed a pass that put them comfortably into field goal range, FanDuel updated the Broncos'; odds, but instead of favoring them, a bug in the system put their odds of winning at 750 to 1. The Broncos made their field goal and won the game, leaving Prince with a ticket worth $82,610.

At first, FanDuel refused to honor the ticket—which would have been worth only $128 if the odds had been updated correctly—offering Prince $500 and New York Giants tickets instead. They issued the
following statement: "A small number of bets were made at the erroneous price over an 18-second period. We honored all such bets on the Broncos to win the game at the accurate market price in accordance with our house rules and industry practice, which specifically address such obvious pricing errors. We have reached out to all impacted customers and apologized for the error."

But Prince was not having it, and made plans to hire an attorney to compel FanDuel to honor the original payoff amount. After consulting with the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (and,
presumably, considering the PR implications), FanDuel reversed course and pledged to pay out the $82.610, as well as any other bets affected by the glitch.

"Above all else, sports betting is supposed to be fun", FanDuel said in a later statement. "As a result of our pricing error this weekend, it wasn't for some of our customers. A 36-yard field goal has
approximately an 85 percent chance of success, so the astronomical odds offered on something highly likely to occur was very obviously a pricing error. These kinds of issues are rare, but they do happen. We want sports betting to be fun. So, this one's on the house. We are paying out these erroneous ticketsand wish the lucky customers well."

While FanDuel's own terms and conditions include a proviso that bets "where a blatant or palpable error is made" may not be honored, different jurisdictions have varying rules on how to deal with erroneous winning bets. In Las Vegas, tickets are typically honored as written, but in the UK, sports bets impacted by palpable errors are often voided.

Both types of testing are a vital part of a complete testing protocol. While it is functional testing that determines the efficacy of an application, it is non-functional testing that determines, for the most part, user experience. Nevertheless, these two types of testing do overlap.

In fact, there isn't really an absolute dividing line. Nonfunctional testing checks things like recoverability after a crash, maintainability and operational readiness. But, when you get into things like reliability and dependability, it can become a matter of function. Functional testing does enter into areas like dependability. For example cross-platform runtime systems can greatly affect the functionality of an application when poor coding causes unreliable interface leading to erratic function or even unworkability. Of course, this can affect the execution of test cases as well as usability testing, but it comes down to a matter of function. Interface testing is a type of functional testing.

Nonfunctional testing is important because software doesn't exist in isolation. It must interact with the environment in which it operates and the more it relies on outside resources, the greater the possibility that there will be a glitch somewhere.

Functional testing provides assurance that the application itself can perform as intended. It can be something as simple as a smoke test, just run the application and see what happens. There is sanity testing, a rather colourful name which means testing the application to see if it is “sane” after defects have been fixed. In other words, it is testing to make sure that no unanticipated problems have been caused by the changes.

All in all, functional and non-functional testing are two sides of the same testing coin. Their purposes may be different in detail, but they exist to ensure the highest quality product possible.

Forrester, the marketing research and analysis firm, has released its annual roundup of predictions for the year ahead, and they’re forecasting that 2019 will see big changes in the role CIOs play in their companies.

Forrester predicts that C-suite executives will move to give CIOs greater ownership over driving technological business innovations. They expect 1 in 4 CIOs to step up and expand the scope of their responsibilities, with the rest serving as what amounts to IT department heads.

Michael Barnes, Vice President and Research Director of Digital Strategy at Forrester, summed it up at a recent company event: “We expect to see CEOs and CIOs mutually agree that the CIO needs to take ownership for driving digital business innovation and technology-led innovation within the firm. It’s time for CIOs to step up. Twenty-five percent of CIOs will expand their remits, and take more control over digital business. The rest will be relegated to a trusted operator.”

Forrester’s analytics indicate that most executives believe technological innovations to be crucial to developing new revenue streams in the years to come. Barnes laid out the actions he would expect to see from successful CIOs in the digital marketplace:

• Align innovations and initiatives with strategic goals

• Rely on vendors for innovation IP as a stepping stone

• Move toward continuous planning and improvement

Barnes went on to emphasise the need to embrace more formal processes for assessing the value of emergent technologies, such as artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things, and to find more effective ways to implement platform-based innovations.

“At a fundamental level,” said Barnes, “that requires the people evaluating the technology to be business leaders. You also need to seed innovation in the firm.”

Barnes cited organisational inertia as a major obstacle to embracing necessary changes, along with a lack of clear and continuous support at the executive level, and fear that change will negatively impact existing revenue sources.

Forrester believes that 2019 will be the year when external pressures force many businesses to go all-in on digital transformation, with targeted initiatives taking precedence over massive, enterprise-wide restructurings. Barnes described this as a pragmatic approach that will lead to more firms moving past the early stages of digital transformation.

According to Forrester’s data, 66% of Australian firms describe themselves as currently in the process of digital transformation, but only 17% claim to have completed it. Barnes encouraged his audience to see digital transformation as an ongoing process that can never be considered “complete,” urging companies to treat improvements to their back-end processes as important as the customer-facing ones.

The retail and wholesale consumer space has shown a marked willingness to accept new technologies. E-commerce relies almost completely on digital payments and may very well be the seed from which a post cash economy grows.

Fintech has stepped in to provide multi-channel payment options such as mobile wallets and person-to-person mobile payments.  While mobile is only beginning to enter the corporate and wholesale space due to more complex transactions and a greater need for security, there is every reason to assume that these problems will be solved. To illustrate, banking customers are already taking advantage of real time payment systems that do not rely on batch processing.

We can expect that the greatest effect of fintech will be in the creation of virtual money. Money has become more and more virtual in the last fifty years. There was a time when banks and governments defined value through the issuance of currency. Governments issued gold or silver coins or paper currency backed by a set amount of gold or silver and banks issued notes redeemable in the precious metals they had on deposit. For example, the word dollar has its origin in the word ‘thaler’ which was the name of a coin minted from silver mined in Joachimsthal Bohemia. Then, as economies grew, basing money on or deriving its value directly from precious metal became impractical, and our modern currency markets evolved.

Now Fintech has created a new form of money called cryptocurrency. This is a totally digital currency that uses encryption techniques to regulate the issuance of monetary units and the  transfer of funds. All of this is done completely independent of any central bank or government. Now that currency is in the process of being decoupled from its traditional points of origin, the payments revolution is on its way to become the monetary revolution, and a very different economy will emerge.

Money is a great idea. It is a standardised system of determining value that is, at least to some extent, independent of the individual buyer and seller. No economy can grow without some way to regulate value. Otherwise, there is no way to prevent some people trying to overvalue products and services while others try to undervalue production for their own benefit.

The problem is that money isn't wealth, it’s a measure of value. It’s still a measure of value even if someone states their net worth in a dollar amount. A person's net worth is composed of things that have value, like houses or cars, and money is the measuring stick. Even the money in a bank account is only as valuable as it can buy things. In other words, it's only as valuable as it can be converted into actual wealth. The proof of this is that inflation and deflation occur when money doesn't realistically track with production in the economy.

The global nature of fintech is exposing one of money's biggest weaknesses - it's very very hard to determine value. Yes, money should track with the production of a society if it is to remain stable, but which society? We live in a society that is rapidly becoming global and this society has many different currencies that have many different values.

Also, the sheer size of the global economy of the 21st Century is making it difficult for governments and banks to keep up, and so cryptocurrencies have arrived to fill in the gap. The very idea of a virtual currency, not issued by a state or state approved bank, a currency that relies on cryptography for its security, would be unthinkable only twenty years ago. But, fintech makes it possible.

We live in an increasingly digital world where transactions move at an ever increasing rate. While established institutions are leary of virtual money, sometimes with good reason, it must be remembered that cryptocurrency evolved as a solution to many of the traditional problems associated with money. There are no simple solutions and whether cryptocurrency remains or disappears in the long run, those problems will still remain. And ultimately, fintech is the only tool that can solve them in a globalized economy.

Security researchers Chris Valasek and Charles Miller performed the hack after spending a year developing the software to hack into a Jeep Cherokee and control the vehicle through its Uconnect media system. Their successful efforts appeared on the Internet and as part of an article in Wired Magazine.

The hackers were able to upload a picture of themselves onto the 8.4 inch touch screen in the Cherokee's dash as well as turn on the radio and blast the volume, turn on the air conditioning and the windshield wipers, spray washer fluid and even turn off the engine all while the vehicle was traveling on the road at 110 kilometers per hour. They were also able, in a parking lot demonstration, to not only unlock the Cherokee, but to also seize control of the steering wheel, when the Jeep was moving in reverse, and disable the breaks.

FCA advised customers to update their software in response, but then changed the advisory to a recall. Chrysler has also initiated increased network level security to block remote access to certain vehicle systems. These measures were tested and put into action on July 23 of this month and don't require customer or dealer action.

Here are the vehicles which are affected by the recall according to Fiat Chrysler's own blog http://blog.fcanorthamerica.com/2015/07/22/unhacking-the-hacked-jeep/

Not all vehicles with 8.4 inch touch screens are affected and the recall is restricted to vehicles in the USA. Customers will receive a USB device and can update the software themselves or they may take their vehicles into the dealership for the update.