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2 Historically Accurate Cases That Show How QA Could Have Saved A Ton Of Money!

Let’s take the fact you don’t want to be embraced for granted. No one does. And yet there are always explicit kinds of people, even among the likes of NASA engineers and MIT graduates who tend to step on the same rake over and over again.

Sure, while burning a couple of millions doesn’t sound too dramatic on their scale of projects, draining your tax money because of easily avoided miscalculations does! It’s painfully embracing even to the brightest minds in the universe.

Taking a gamble at unknown industry and failing is one thing. But dooming projects you are best at because of tiny bits of easily avoidable inaccuracy is an entirely different picture.

Yeah, maybe you can call our http://www.deviqa.com Quality Assurance service a bit overreactive, but it’s only because we tend to ensure that products are released when they are ready. Quality runs through our veins. That’s why we would like you to be the judge – are following inaccuracies acceptable?

Number One: NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter

This story took place in 1998. NASA’s climate orbiter mission on Mars was a complete fiasco. Their spacecraft simply fell down, when approaching Red Planet’s orbit like a stone. Do note that the stone has glided to its doom along with $125 million!

How’d that happen? Nope, no little green men were involved. Nobody blasted our craft down and there we no interplanetary war declarations. We simply forgot to convert the data from Empiric to Metric.

The thing is that there was an international tea, of experts working on the project. Thus all of the involved members have agreed upon a single system of measurement.

qa_nasa

A single QA session would have prevented the embarrassing experience from ever happening. A simple check could have saved millions. Hopefully people at NASA learn from their mistakes.

Microsoft VS Pirates!

August 24th was a fabulous day in 2007 for anyone but a person who wanted to install Windows. There was a thing back in the day – Windows Genuine Advantage – and it was meant to stop digital piracy. And guess what – it didn’t work. Not in the way it was supposed to at least.

WGA considered legally purchased copies of Vista as pirated software. You, as a user, were told about the error and punished with zero access to several features of the OS. Funny thing about the bug is that it was caused by both man and machine. Someone just uploaded an early version of WGA on to the servers.

Lessons learned

Mistakes are easily avoidable if enough attention is dedicated to them. Eah, you can learn from them. They can make you and your company stronger, but…

…If you are not as big as NASA or Microsoft, you won’t probably have that second chance. You won’t have the time or resources for fixes and redemption. Users will simply move on. So why risk it if there’s QA?

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