Category Archives: Sofeware Testing

Hire Software Testers in Beijing, China

software testers

In the past few years, China has made huge efforts to play a major role in the software industry. With the maturity of Chinese software market, customers now expect more on software quality, security and reliability. Software testing is becoming a dark horse in Chinese software industry. Meanwhile, software tester has become a popular job.

The process of software testing in China may consume two thirds or up to half of the total budget of software development. Thus, it is important to hire software testers to ensure that it runs smoothly since the loss would be huge if the application fails in running. At present, both customers and companies require faster and more sophisticated applications, increasing need for software testing solutions and services. Defective software would not only bring huge financial loss but also apply serious damages on a company’s brand and reputation.

Software configuration management is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software development, and relevant tools are used in this process. If the developers are capable of writing the standard codes with no mistakes, the rate of software error would decrease and so would it reduce the burden on the testers. Automatic testing tools and performance testing tools play an important role in software testing in China. A testing tool with no faults can remarkably increase the testing efficiency. Here at RayooTech, we provide testing technologies including functional & regression testing tools, performance testing tools, unit testing tools and test management.

With China’s software industry booming constantly, the importance of software testing in China is also valued higher by software companies. Many large and medium-sized software companies have begun to hire software testers in Beijing, China in the software testing field. Apart from recruiting more staff, many companies now also demand more in staff quality, seeking talents with abundant testing experience and creative thinking skills.

RayooTech is a professional company specialising in software testing in China. We devote all our efforts to provide a large range of software testing services including functional testing, performance testing, security testing, compatibility testing and many more. Hire software testers in China, we help you keep down project cost, minimize business risks and grant you access to up-to-date testing technologies that will best serve your needs.

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iPhone Vulnerability: Return of the Lock Screen Bypass

iphone lock screen

Reports yesterday of a lock screen bypass in the iPhone 5 noted that a "similar" bug was found in iOS 4.1 and fixed in 4.2. In both cases, the lock screen, which is only supposed to let you make emergency calls or enter the lock code, allows the user to perform other functions, like make other phone calls. How do these errors resurface after being fixed? In Apple’s case, the problem could be a weakness in their test plans or procedures.

The iPhone lock screen
When an error that was fixed shows up again later it is called a regression error. Regression errors generally are when some change to the program, a new version or software patch, breaks some feature of the program. Security fixes are one type of feature that could be broken.

Controlling regression errors is a matter of proper documentation and testing. Good code documentation should at least give future developers the chance to recognize that changes will affect the feature. But it’s testing that is the key to preventing regressions.

Any well-designed software project has a formal test plan as part of it. As new features and bug fixes are added, test should also be added to the test plan to make sure that new fixes don’t break old features or fixes. In the case of security patches, a test needs to be added to the plan to check for each vulnerability that is fixed.

The real key to making regression testing practical is to automate it. Back around 2007 and 2008, Mozilla had a very bad problem with security patches causing regressions of other security patches. They finally got it under control and attributed their success, in part, to increased automated testing.

Almost any test can be automated, even by simulating user interface actions by hardware through the USB connection to the device. But the lock screen on iOS is a problem for test automation. The lock screen is designed not to allow external hardware to break out of it, lest someone else take your phone and gain control of it. There’s no automated way to test it, so you have to test it manually.

In all likelihood, Apple has some manual tests to perform as well, but it’s easy to see how they would get shrugged off in a hurry or given to some intern who didn’t execute them properly. Expect an angry memo to go around at Apple about this, but deadlines are deadlines and one day the manual testing will again seem like a corner worth cutting.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/iphone-vulnerability-return-of-the-lock/240148663

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Can New Software Testing Frameworks Bring Us to Provably Correct Software?

Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra is renowned for his contributions to programming languages and for creating the phrase "Go to Considered Harmful."

Within testing circles, he is known for his proof that testing addition for two 32-bit integers a microsecond at a time, would take longer than the known history of the universe. (The problem isn’t the 32 bits but that two variables together create 64 bits of combinations.) This leads to Dijktra’s famous quotation: "Testing can show the presence of errors, but not their absence."

Most programs are more complex than adding two numbers together. This leads some academics and practitioners to abandon testing and to pursue "proof of correctness" instead. These proofs can demonstrate that a requirements document, probably expressed in symbols, is correctly implemented in code.

Wirth argues that proofs of correctness should be included in programming courses in undergraduate computer science, while C.A.R. Hoare proposes the Floyd-Hoare notation. Sidney L. Hantler and James C. Kind, meanwhile, provide an excellent introduction to proving the correctness of programs, making it clear that the size of the proof will grow much faster than the code itself.

In other words, where the code for a 10-line procedure could be proven in an academic exercise, it’s just not feasible for a real, industry computer program. This problem of exploding complexity in code is not new. The NATO Software Engineering Conference identified is as the "software crisis" back in 1968.

Where "proof of correctness" may not be feasible, there have been attempts to move in that direction, to provide more rigor and correctness around a program before it gets to testing. A few of the more popular ways to address this include the transformational specification, model-based testing and Fred Brooks’ "Bronze Bullets." Each is discussed below.

Source: http://www.cio.com/article/728641/Can_New_Software_Testing_Frameworks_Bring_Us_to_Provably_Correct_Software_

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Maximizing the value of cloud-based development and testing environment

Historically, development and testing environments have been built and managed at the project level, and often remain underfunded, under-resourced and underutilized for significant periods of time. The development and testing demand and the IT infrastructure management processes differ in their DNA. Development and testing is unpredictable and has variable demand cycles while the IT managers look at smoother predictable operations, gradual capacity building and higher utilization. Despite being a crucial IT function, the inability to quickly provide the capacity needed by development and testing teams delays the application development life cycle and hampers the delivery of an application quickly and efficiently.

As the pace of change and the level of competition is growing, businesses today need agile IT environment to match the highly dynamic and resource intensive needs of the application development and testing – a business critical function.

According to Gartner, cloud and mobility will drive the worldwide application development market to exceed USD 10 billion in 2013. By leveraging cloud, developers, test engineers, and QA teams can develop and perform extensive scenario testing in shorter cycles. Here’s how:

Cloud provides developers and test engineers with a self-service model for requesting and almost instantly receiving resources from within a pool of secured, shared and scalable infrastructure resources. This capability can shave days or even weeks off of application development project times, speeding time to market. Cloud also enables these teams to build configuration templates and machine snapshots in seconds, run them in parallel, and customize them to meet the needs.

Test engineers can quickly deploy configurations and scale performance on-demand heavy load testing, saving time and operational costs over traditional on-premise development and testing environments.

Benefits of moving development and testing to the cloud include:

• Achieve faster time-to-market and greater flexibility for new products and services.
• Automate approval workflows and reduce the cost of IT infrastructure management.
• Enhance ID & Access control and safeguard data with a private or a hybrid solution.
• Utilize infrastructure capacity efficiently with granular monitoring and management of infrastructure resources.

Considerations for cloud-based development and testing

While development and testing in a cloud-based model addresses the traditional roadblocks of cost, scalability, and lack of process and methodology, it has its own challenges:

Security & Control – Businesses may have applications that need to comply with regulatory and corporate restrictions around security and data privacy for e.g. access control for offshore and sub-contractors or an applicable local law that mandates compliance to data residency and hence restricts usage of a public cloud for data/devices. These may not even move to an off-premise cloud instance for development and testing because of proprietary/legacy systems, as well as intellectual property security considerations. In addition, control & governance mechanism needs to be set for integrating workflows, identity management, usage metering, chargeback, etc. to ensure efficiency and quality.

Interoperability – Businesses may be confronted with issues surrounding legacy systems development & testing on the cloud as connecting to legacy systems from the external cloud may pose interoperability issues. The ability to integrate with existing systems and share data between different platforms may need multi-tier technology architecture.

Performance – As development and testing environment on cloud maybe shared by numerous users, there may be cases where businesses may have to wait for the required bandwidth. Uptime is an important consideration when developing and testing on the cloud to assess the performance characteristics of an application. The IT admins have to ensure that underlying hardware provides adequate performance levels across storage, network and compute in a private cloud, while such tweaking may not be available in a public cloud.

Monitoring – Monitoring of application, which is in a distributed format, one spanning multiple servers, on multi-cloud environment or accessing multiple applications through web services, becomes difficult from a performance, security and availability perspective. A full-featured logging and tracing mechanism for troubleshooting becomes imperative. Measuring the cloud utilization by various teams and business units enables better capacity planning for future.

Management – Servicing and managing development and testing environment has been challenging because of the bursty workloads and the dynamic service requests. The current processes are designed around current IT service delivery models. The processes such as provisioning, procurement, configuration and de-provisioning of the resources are manpower intensive at the transactional levels and automation is limited by the technology. While cloud provides a wide variety of build/integration systems, test harnesses, and development and testing tools, there is still a need to bring all of this together in a turnkey and managed model to reduce the burden of managing development and testing infrastructure on cloud.

Developing for the cloud

– Developing applications to run on cloud is different from developing applications for a traditional or virtualized IT environment. Developers must build applications that consider resource unavailability and is able to recover from such incidences. For e.g. a multi-tier application should be loosely coupled and ready for any other tier failure. The application should be built in a way that allows multiple instances of a component to run concurrently so that in case an instance fails, the components could easily switch to another instance.

Critical Success Factors

A thorough planning and selecting the right technology and cloud service provider must be done in order to maximize the value of the cloud-based development and testing environment.

To understand cloud-ready environments, some key architectural requirements of a cloud-based development and testing environment must be known:

+ What hardware/compute resources will be used and will it be capable of achieving development and testing objective?
+ What resources (wiring and cabling, SAN and storage, rack space etc.) will be needed before any servers or workloads are installed?
+ What networking and data storage capabilities in terms of capacity will be required?
+ What workloads/applications will be placed in the cloud?

Businesses must make sure that the cloud-based development and testing environment is aptly architected for hybrid environment and does not lead to application performance degradation.

Once the development and testing environment in the cloud is established, businesses must take into consideration the following to ensure an agile development and testing life cycle:

+ Template library of ready-to-use VMs, defining server, capacity & storage requirements along with application components, must be created. Such templates allow team members to quickly duplicate environments and streamline provisioning.

+ Services in the cloud should be integrated with the right chargeback/metering processes and tools. This will enable enterprises with the financial thresholds and control of costs in the development and testing cloud.

A comprehensive cloud solution for development and testing provides increased control over projects, speed of deployment, ease of collaboration, and the ability to access environments on demand, enabling efficient and quality application development and testing.

Source: http://www.informationweek.in/cloud_computing/13-02-08/maximizing_the_value_of_cloud-based_development_and_testing_environment.aspx

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Mobile App Development: 94% of Software Developers Bet on HTML5 Winning

 

A few months ago when Facebook admitted defeat and went native with its iOS app, some thought it was a death-knell for HTML5. But most of the 4,034 developers in a recent survey disagree — vehemently.

In fact, according to the recent survey by mobile app tools vendor Kendo UI, 94 percent of developers are either using HTML5, or plan to start using it this year, leaving only a minuscule six percent who have no plans to develop with HTML5 before 2013 rolls around in just two short months.

That’s the kind of stat that is sometimes easy to manipulate when there’s a larger percentage in the wishy-washier “planning” segment, but not in this case, with a full 63 percent of developers using HTML5 today.

That’s impressive.

HTML5 is an updated version of the old-school hyper-text markup language that makes up much of the web today. It enables developers to build on their existing knowledge of web technologies such as HTML, Javascript, and cascading style sheets to create mobile apps through frameworks such as Adobe’s PhoneGap rather than having to learn Objective-C to write full-native iPhone/iPad apps, or Java to write Android apps. Probably even more importantly, by using cross-platform technologies like PhoneGap, HTML5 enables developers to write their apps once and deploy on all major mobile platforms.

Given the numbers who are already using HTML5, it’s no shock that 82 percent of developers also say that the technology will be important to their jobs in the next year, and a further 12 percent believe it will be become important within the next two years.

Developers’ rationale for using and preferring HTML5 is no shock to anyone who’s ever developed native apps for multiple mobile platforms. Sixty-two percent said that HTML5′s ability to enable cross-platform support was an important factor in choosing the technology, with another third saying that the availability of tools and code libraries make it appealing.

But the biggest reason developers like HTML5?

Familiarity. Almost three-quarters of developers said that HTML, Javascript, and CSS were familiar languages which enabled easy access to mobile app markets.

And what about Facebook’s move away from HTML5. Apparently, that hasn’t shaken developers’ belief in the technology — half of them weren’t even aware of the move. Of those who did, however, while 17 percent had less faith in HTML5 after the news, 18 percent had more faith.

The survey is obviously from a company with a vested interest in HTML5 adoption, but it jibes with what I’ve heard from people like Andi Gutmans, key developer of the PHP programming language and current CEO of Zend, who is pushing what he calls cloud-connected mobile apps and just released a version of Zend Studio that enables developers to build native mobile apps with familiar web technologies.

Which, frankly, just makes sense if you don’t want to build the same app three times for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone … and if your app is not the most computationally intensive app in the world and absolutely needs to be fully native for performance reasons.

source: http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/mobile-app-development-94-of-software-developers-betting-on-html5-winning/

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Nine Apple Patents Cover a Gimbal Press, LTE Technology & More

 

1. 9 patents cover gimbal press, more lte technology & more
 

An Overview of Nine Original Patent Filings from Apple

Apple’s Patent Application 20120268392 is titled "Gimbal Press."

Apple’s Patent Abstract: A computing device includes a touchpad having a plurality of internal diaphragms that allow the touchpad to sense downward force inputs. The diaphragms are evenly glued about their circumferential edge portions to an internal flat surface by way of a gimbal press. The gimbal press could include a force delivery component coupled to an upper plate having an internal depression, a lower plate having a ball bearing that accepts force from the upper plate via the internal depression, a flexible ring member, and a compliant annular component. Both plates have a plurality of interlocking features with grooves extending therethrough that accept the flexible ring member. Force is evenly distributed to the diaphragm via a gimbal effect at the ball bearing, and the flexible ring member centers the upper and lower plates with respect to each other while permitting some relative tilt and rotation between the plates.

2A Gimbal Press patent figures

Apple’s Patent Application 20120270545 is titled "Dual Network Mobile Device Radio Resource Management." The key to this patent application is that it’s one of Apple’s LTE based patents.

Apple’s Patent Application 20120272338 is titled "Unified Tracking Data Management." Apple’s invention relates generally to tracking data from websites. More particularly, this invention relates to a unified manner to expose and manage tracking data from websites. Patent FIG. 4 shown below illustrates an example of unified management of usage tracking data.

3. Patent Unified Tracking

Apple’s Patent Application 20120272297 is titled "Cross-Transport Authentication." Apple’s invention relates generally to authentication and in particular to cross-transport authentication for use in communications between a portable media device and an accessory device.

Apple’s Patent Application 20120272230 is titled "Power Saving Application Update in a Portable Electronic Device." The first point in Apple’s Summary states that "Many portable electronic devices include various applications and widgets that rely on periodically obtaining data from remote network repositories. After the updated data is typically shown to a user on a screen of the portable electronic device only when the screen has been turned on and the device has exited a sleep state. There is a need for a power saving mode that efficiently controls the update of such data."

4A. from Patent - Power savings app update in a portable device

Apple’s Patent Application 20120272163 is titled "Application-Specific Group Listing." Apple’s invention relates generally to a user interface for sharing content, and, more particularly, to a method, apparatus and system for providing utilization of an intermediary module to share content relating to a particular application.

Apple’s Patent Application 20120271970 is titled "Situational Playback." Apple’s invention relates to a portable media device and more particularly to processing media assets in accordance with a situational context of the portable media device.

Apple’s Patent Application 20120270424 is titled "Edge Connector for Shielded Adapter." Apple’s invention relates to electrical connections that may provide highly manufacturable, well-shielded paths between cables and printed circuit boards.

Apple’s Patent Application 20120270448 is titled "USB Connector having Vertical to Horizontal Conversion Contacts." Apple’s invention may provide connector receptacles that may provide a right-angle translation, may be readily manufactured, and may have an aesthetically pleasing appearance.

5. patent - usb connector having vertical to horizontal conversion contacts

Apple’s patent FIG. 2 illustrates a connector receptacle, while patent FIG. 4 illustrates an oblique view of contacts and a first housing portion.

Today’s Continuation Patents

In addition to the nine patent applications presented in today’s report, the US Patent and Trademark Office did in fact publish a series of older continuation patents dating back to between 2004 and 2010. The continuation patents that we list below are specifically referenced as such in each filing under the section titled "Cross-Reference to Related Applications." Generally speaking, continuation patents represent tweaks made to patent claims in an effort to get the patents granted by the USPTO and don’t represent any noteworthy new development from the original patent filing. Some websites will try to pass these filings off as new patents for the sake of clicks. We prefer to be upfront about them to keep you better informed.

Here are today’s continuation patents should you wish to review them:

Continuation Patent 20120268410 is a 2010 patent application titled "Working with 3D Objects." To get an overview of this filing, see our report titled "Apple’s Wild New 3D Gesturing is aimed at CAD, Avatar Creation & More."

6. Continuation Patent - working with 3D objects

Continuation Patent 20120268881 is a 2009 patent filing titled "Portable Computer Display Housing." The patent relates to the MacBook Pro.

Continuation Patent 20120268882 is a 2009/2010 patent filing titled "Display Module," which is about methods of assembling devices such as the iPad.

Continuation Patent 20120270567 is a 2004/2005 patent filing titled "System and method for anonymous location based services."

Continuation Patent 20120269364 is a 2006 patent filing titled "Composite Audio Waveforms."

source:  http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/10/nine-apple-patents-cover-a-gimbal-press-lte-technology-more.html

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Facebook: Mobile Growth Takes Off in Emerging Markets

Growth in the mobile market is taking off for Facebook in emerging markets. While Facebook is the number one site U.S. mobile users spend time on line, mobile usage of the social network is even higher in most emerging markets, Facebook Vice President of corporate development Vaughan Smith said at the Global Mobile Internet Conference Silicon Valley in San Jose on Friday.

Facebook is a key reason why people in emerging markets are adding data plans on mobile, said Smith.  “Operators have invested tens of billions of dollars building out 3G networks around the world and users are not saying ‘I want to get on the Internet.’ They are saying ‘I want to get on Facebook,” Smith explained.

 

Yuri Milner And Chinese Billionaire Lei Jun Discuss The Future of Mobile

With the exception of China, Facebook is the dominant social network in emerging markets, he added. Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009 when riots broke out in the western region of Xinjiang Province.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced this month that the company has more than 1 billion monthly active users. As the West approaches a saturation point with the site, Facebook is looking to emerging markets in Asia, South America and Africa to fuel its next stage of growth.

According to Facebook, developing countries have shown strong growth. India’s user base has grown eightfold in last two years to 65 million. Brazil has 54 million registered users on Facebook, with a growth rate of 146 percent so far this year. Yet both India and Brazil are large countries with millions of potential users who have yet to join Facebook: only 5% of India’s population and 27% of Brazil’s population is on Facebook, compared to 49% of the U.S. population.

Smith said that for many people in emerging markets, mobile phones are the primary point of web access. The high price point for both PCs and wired Internet access makes access to the web via mobile phone a much more attainable reality. According to a new collection of statistics by the web site Pingdom, as of January 2012, of the 2.1 billion active Internet users worldwide, 1.2 billion people access the web via a mobile device.  In India, for example, nearly 50% of consumer Internet usage is accessed through mobile phones.

The declining cost of smartphones has driven the rapid growth of the number of people accessing the Internet via their mobile devices, Smith said.

Latest statistics from IT research company Canalys show that China has overtaken the US in smartphones sales. In the second quarter of 2012, 42 million smartphones were shipped in China, versus 25 million in the United States. Chinese smartphone sales tripled last year.

Smith said that because Facebook users in the rest of the world are accessing Facebook via smartphones, Facebook has also revamped its product development efforts to focus on mobile. “As recently as last year 80% of a product review would talk about the desktop website,” said Smith. But since then “we pivoted our thinking to how can we create the right mobile experience first, and the desktop can catch up later.”

The company has trained all its engineers to be mobile developers and ramped up its update cycle for its Android and iOS apps, he added.

As part of its mission to be a mobile-first company, Facebook bought the popular mobile photo-sharing site Instagram for $1 billion, decided to let third-party developers buy mobile ads in users’ News Feeds, and continues its investment in HTML 5, the programming language that powers its mobile site, Smith said. HTML 5 is also part of the company’s strategy to get into emerging markets.

Among the 1 billion monthly active users on Facebook, 600 million are mobile users, Facebook said recently.

source:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurahe/2012/10/21/facebook-mobile-growth-takes-off-in-emerging-markets/

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Xbox 360 to Get Internet Explorer with Windows 8 Release

It’s official, users will soon be able to surf the Web on their Xbox 360. Microsoft announced today that the Internet Explorer browser will be included with a new update to the Xbox 360 dashboard. The update will come with the release of Windows 8 on October 26.

"Starting today Internet Explorer will begin being rolled out on Xbox LIVE and will be available to Xbox LIVE Gold members," Internet Explorer’s General Manager Ryan Gavin wrote in a blog post today. "IE on Xbox enables you to view content on the web on your TV and includes great features like the ability to personalize your dashboard by pinning your favorite web sites and watching HTML5 videos on the web."

Rumblings of the Internet coming to the Xbox 360 started earlier this year and during the E3 gaming conference Microsoft showed off what the feature would look like and how it would work. This move brings Microsoft closer to integrating more of its products into the same ecosystem.

Along with being able to search the entire Internet straight from their gaming consoles, users will be able use Windows 8′s Xbox Smart Glass on Web features like text input, scrolling, and pinch and zoom. To get this feature, users have to be Xbox Live Gold members, which costs roughly $50 per year.

Microsoft also announced this week that with Windows 8 it was adding 30 million music tracks to its Xbox Music service. The service will let users stream music for free, creating custom playlists, as long as they’re willing to hear occasional ads. The software giant is rolling out Xbox Music across its consumer offerings — on Xbox 360 consoles, Windows 8 tablets, and PCs. Reportedly, it will also come to Windows Phone 8 in the not-too-distant future.

source:   http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57533792-75/xbox-360-to-get-internet-explorer-with-windows-8-release/

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Facebook’s 5% Solution in Data Centers

Forget the way we live and share on Facebook. The biggest innovation at the social network may be in back-end plumbing and innovative pricing. It is starting to affect the rest of the tech industry.

Behind the cat photos and Oscar opinions of one billion humans is Facebook’s burgeoning network of data centers. As complex as managing people’s personal data and sending them ads is, the company tries to buy from a relatively small number of suppliers, whom it keeps on a short leash.

“In computing at this scale, the data center is a factory floor,” says Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook. “We try to keep things simple.”

Equipping the data factory works like this: Mr. Frankovsky and his team of about 25 people design five types of computers to run most of Facebook. These are Web page servers, database computers, data storage systems, news feed servers and something called memcache servers, which speed overall performance. They then figure out what it costs to build each kind of machine, and buy from a supplier, known in the industry as an O.E.M., or original equipment manufacturer, if that maker can equal or better Facebook’s performance, at a price within 5 percent of what Facebook figures is its own cost.

“When we first said we’d build our own machines three years ago, the O.E.M.’s didn’t believe it,” Mr. Frankovsky says. In the last release of Intel’s mass-market semiconductor for servers, he says, “we were internally ready three months before everyone else.”

The speed with which Facebook made the new computers, he said, was a result more of the incumbent manufacturers’ older design, manufacturing and sales processes than anything novel that Facebook did.

The Facebook purchasing model has been disruptive to many traditional suppliers, like Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Initially. at least, it seems to have helped ultra-cheap Asian manufacturers like Quanta Computer. Quanta, which makes the laptops sold by Apple, H.P. and others, began selling Facebook and others shrink-wrapped racks of servers instead of individual boxes. It now now supplies 80 percent of Facebook’s Web servers, Mr. Frankovsky says.

H.P. has responded by taking a more active role in the Open Compute Project, an open source project started by Facebook to build big data centers that are more energy efficient. A Web server from H.P., code-named “Coyote,” is now being tested at Facebook. Its “Moonshot” server, built for big data centers with the type of chips usually in cellphones, should also be a candidate when it comes out later this year.

While H.P. is selling substantially fewer computers to Facebook than it used to, Mr. Frankovsky credits it for reacting to a trend. “This industry is shifting from supplying lots of small and medium-sized businesses with lots of different computer requirements, towards clouds,” he says. By selling new products to Facebook with little profit, he says, “they get low margins, but they understand what they could design to sell in the long term.”

It works out nicely for Facebook that way, too.

As painful and testing as this customer-led price demand may be, at least some suppliers say it is a healthy system. “The burden falls on the tech guys to keep their product from becoming a commodity,” says David Yen, senior vice president of the data center technology group at Cisco Systems. “Facebook is pushing new standards that force companies to innovate.”

In addition to Mr. Frankovsky, the Open Compute Project’s board includes Andy Bechtolshiem, a founder of the innovative server maker Arista Networks; Jason Waxman, the head of high-density computing at Intel; and representatives from Rackspace Hosting and Goldman Sachs, which consumes a lot of computing power.

What is missing from the group, it seems, is much of a presence from Amazon Web Services or anything at all from Google. Google, which builds its own machines inside perhaps the biggest data centers of all, has played alone, to a point of not patenting its inventions for fear of disclosing its methods and giving up secrets around power consumption and data transfer speed.

source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/facebooks-5-percent-solution-in-data-centers/

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Outsource the Full Software Lifecycle and Avoid Unexpected Software Crashes

I have blogged recently about the trend for companies to outsource software testing. IT services forms are increasingly investing in their software testing capabilities.

This involves resources used to test whether the functionality is right, whether it does what it is supposed to. Suppliers are buying into methodologies such as the independent Test Maturity Model integrated (TMMi), which has five stages and ensures testing is carried out throughout the development process rather than when it is finished.

But service providers are also investing in technology to check the structural quality of the code well before the functionality testing takes place.

This is important because although software might be functional and do what it is supposed to, it might have little errors hidden away that become problems in the future.

I am not saying that banking failures such as, most recently a system error at Lloyds TSB causing customers problems, are the result of structural problems with software but if it is taking time to explain problems it could be.

Back to my point about IT services firms investing in analysing the structural quality of software. I met up with Lev Lesokhin from Cast Software yesterday. The company does analysis of the structural quality of software to find if there are errors that are overlooked in development that might cause future problems. It describes these as "critical violations".

Cast sells its services to both suppliers and direct to end user businesses. About 60% of sales are direct to end user businesses.

Its business customers include Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank and the US army. These companies scan their software using the Cast software to catch potential future problems. This will save a lot of money that will be required for fixes, not to mention reducing the risk of reputational damage caused by failures.

Lev told me about the growing number of service providers that are now taking on the service. IBM and Capgemini have been customers for a while. It also works with companies like HCL, Mahindra Satyam and Steria. These companies are using this within their own software development teams to test quality and are offering the Cast product as a service. It has become a calling card for some.

I wanted to get people’s views on this so please leave comments about the processes you use to check the structural quality of applications.

 

source: http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/inside-outsourcing/2012/10/outsource-the-full-software-lifecycle-and-avoid-unexpected-software-crashes.html

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