WILMINGTON, Del., July 26,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Bugs and Defects after
Production are not uncommon, but with Spec2TestAI™ defect
prevention platform, that's about to change.
Last Friday, a software defect was released during an update
rendering 8.5 million users unable to conduct various regular
course of business functions. One defect's destructive influence
flew through the cloud affecting everything from rail systems and
air travel to small businesses, banking, emergency operations and
hospitals. In defense of releasing a tainted update, issues
like this happen quite often just not to the public facing degree
as this outage did. Over the years, defects and bugs have
been responsible for catastrophic car failures, power outages,
deadly medical device malfunctions, costly banking failures, you
name it. Once the covers are pulled back on Software
Development process as it's executed today, it's a wonder that
outages of this magnitude aren't more frequent. It's a testament to
just how good the professionals are working in the mass deployed
Software Development arena.
There's a fundamental problem that exists in the Software
Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Quality is not getting addressed
early enough in the process, reinforcing the inherent poor-quality
problem. According to the Consortium for Information &
Software Quality in their January
2022 study, The Cost of Poor Software Quality, there's
a 2.4 trillion dollar (Yes, Trillion
with a T) annual quality problem in the
United States alone, stemming from bugs and defects.
This number before now invoked underwhelming concern, but as the
effects of a single defect in an update rippled its way through its
reach reputational and financial fallout becomes a more palpable
figure. We now can clearly see how one defect can inadvertently be
responsible for over a billion dollars in lost revenue from
debilitated services, it may take years to fully quantify.
Today, the Agile methodology, or an Agile hybrid, is the most
widely adopted standard for Software Design and Development. Agile
prioritizes the ability to react nimbly to feature, function, and
design changes to satisfy additional requests while concomitantly
maintaining quick release schedules. Agile approaches to project
delivery have been extremely beneficial for narrowing the focus of
development efforts and increasing the speed of delivery to
production. However, the speed required to achieve
ever-shortening timelines increases the "pressure to deliver" on
every SDLC team member, including those gathering the
requirements. The need for speed introduces unintended risk
factors in a series of events that are already vulnerable to risk
by nature. Hastening through the SDLC, particularly in the
requirements stage can easily result in missed, misstated
and/or ambiguous requirements which if not corrected or interpreted
correctly, become preventable defects.
But how is it that these bugs and defects make it all the way
through the SDLC to be released in production if the software or
update is Quality Tested before release? There lies a very
large part of the problem. Today, Quality is almost always
addressed at the end of the SDLC. Rather than being introduced at
the requirements phase and managed throughout the SDLC process,
quality is tested after coding with very little pre-development
insight. The process itself is conducive to leaving the nuance and
ambiguities open to interpretation by the Development and Quality
Assurance teams. Open to interpretation leads to open to bug and
defect causing gaps and misalignment between software product
design, code development, and quality testing.
In May 2022 ChatGPT released Large
Language Models (LLMs) to the masses. Since that time
developers and tech creatives worldwide have been leveraging LLM
capabilities to improve efficiency, productivity, automation,
security, and quality of life in every vertical and industry
imaginable, including software development itself. The focus on
bringing AI to the software development industry has primarily
revolved around automated testing and code development to boost
productivity and improve speed to market times. Meanwhile, the
fundamentals of well-defined requirements, user stories and
acceptance criteria have all but been ignored.
The Founder of AgileAI Labs, Inc. Scott
Aziz, saw the writing on the wall after years of leadership
in the Quality Engineering field. He understood that when it
pertains to quality test development, directly aligning to the
requirements and acceptance criteria is a software quality
imperative. According to a study in Crosstalk, The
Journal of Defence Software Engineering, 64% of all bugs and
defects originate in the requirement analysis and design phase.
Years of professional experience and frustration dealing with
poorly developed requirements is precisely why Aziz began tackling
what he perceived to be "fixable" defect introducing problems.
Determined to create a solution, in May of 2023 after thousands of
hours of LLM training, prompting and testing, Aziz had developed
the first iteration of Spec2TestAI™.
In June of 2023, Aziz began reaching out to expert advisors in
the field and began onboarding a leadership team of corporate risk,
security, quality assurance and efficiency improvement executives
to improve the capabilities of the tool and bring Spec2TestAI™ to
market.
"After 20+ years within financial verticals, in primarily
Ops/Risk roles, I can state with certainty that
Spec2TestAI™ is a platform every organization should have in
their toolbox. I was so impressed by the ability to finally solve
what always seemed like a widely accepted insurmountable problem
I'd dealt with for decades, I joined the company" said Peggy Knox, Chief Operating Officer at AgileAI
Labs.
AgileAI Labs, Inc. was launched in October later that year
and it's first SDLC defect prevention tool, Spec2TestAI Paradigm™
was released. Today Spec2TestAI™ is the only product Suite on the
market today addressing poor quality by improving and refining
requirements to identify potential bugs and defects and then
generating appropriate test and development assets.
Knox shared her first experience with the platform, "When the
Spec2TestAI™ platform was first demonstrated for me last year, I
was stunned. To see that the AI had been trained to produce
dozens of assets which clearly identified ambiguities, incomplete
requirements, missing requirements, conflicts across User Stories,
and even provided pertinent questions and clarifications needed to
fill gaps? I was mind blown. I was so excited by the requirements
analysis that I barely gave notice to the numerous traceable test
assets generated by the platform. I was so taken aback by the risk
reduction value I was seeing; it took me a minute to wrap my head
around the productivity value. Thirty plus hours of manual work was
produced in about five minutes." Knox elaborated, "The ability to
improve the Agile process for all stakeholders through the SDLC
with this new technology, Spec2TestAI, yes, it's a game changer.
One that should be in everybody's toolbox."
Spec2TestAI™ is a patent-pending Software as a Service
(SaaS) platform with 4 versions increasing in capability and
complexity. Each level of the platform assists the user in
understanding how to remediate ambiguities, deficiencies, and
incompatibilities creating the 'find and fix' defects problem
plaguing the software market today. The platform generates
stakeholder questions, exposes areas where clarifications are
needed, and makes recommendations based on industry standard best
practices and AI generated enhancements and gap analysis.
Fully traceable and transparent test assets and code frameworks are
then automatically generated to ensure requirements have captured
project goals accurately and then are tested appropriately with
traceable, prioritized test cases.
Some of the Spec2TestAI™ Defect Prevention Platform's Key
Features:
- Defect Prevention Analysis: The tool's emphasis on
defect prevention automatically removes defects aligned to industry
best practices, and its powerful patent pending AI engine
eliminates ambiguities in user stories with just one click.
- Company Specific Uploads: Provide the platform with
company specific context, formats, security requirements, and more
for analysis against current project requirements and acceptance
criteria.
- Project Health Dashboard: Get Real-Time insights on
defect potentials and the status of your project's overall health
and effortlessly make corrections as needed.
- Comprehensive Test Case Generation in < 6 minutes:
Functional, Edge, Negative, Security, UAT, etc.
- Industry Standardization Built-in: SDLC Best Management
Practices are Applied. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) feature
and step files are automatically generated, saving hours.
- Security Frameworks: Based on OWASP top 10
standards.
- Automated Code Frameworks: Multi-language support for
Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc.
- Transparent Traceability and Audit Readiness: This
transparency is invaluable during audits to showcase adherence to
prescribed standards.
After the mass outage that occurred last week,
companies should be made aware there's a revolutionary platform on
the market that provides a level of detailed requirements analysis
and defect prevention the likes of which have never been possible
before. Spec2TestAI™ is an intelligent solution for reducing
risk, improving productivity, and equipping teams with the tools
they need to successfully navigate through the SDLC to meet project
goals.
As of this writing, AgileAI Labs, Inc. is
offering a free 14-day free trial of the Spec2TestAI Abriz™
platform to any company interested in reducing risk, stopping
defects before they happen, and equipping project teams to improve
productivity, project costs and outcomes, and customer
satisfaction.
Spec2TestAI™ Pricing and Availability:
The free trial is available through the contact page at
www.agileailabs.com
NEWS PROVIDED BY AgileAI Labs, Inc.
AgileAI Labs, Inc., A Delaware Company, is Headquartered in
Manchester, NH
923 Elm Street, #64
Manchester, NH 03101
PH: 561-315-8031
Contact: AgileAI Labs, Inc.
Missy Trumpler
561-315-8031
missyt@agileailabs.com
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SOURCE AgileAI Labs, Inc.