Many in-the-wild tests that put mobile devices through rough and tumble situations make sense. You’re lucky if you can unwrap your phone without getting a wayward scratch on the surface. You will, one day, without a doubt, drop your phone – maybe even from an unfortunate height. And the odds of your device coming into contact with water are probably higher than we’d all like. But then, there are the downright outlandish tests. I’d like to see the everyday, real-life scenario that inspired such extreme tests as the blender test.

I’m actually impressed with how little damage the Galaxy S III sustains for such a long period of time. Sure, it’s in three pieces, but the iPhone 5 is dust long before those three Samsung pieces start giving. Nevertheless, I’d recommend not dropping your phone in a blender, or at the very least, quickly retrieving it (after you turn the blender off please!).

We could be extreme testing the blender though, in which case, good job blender!

We all know Cyber Monday is a huge day for online purchases. However, what most Cyber Monday shoppers don’t know is that most retail sites on the web are not secure. According to VentureBeat, 61% of malicious sites are trusted sites that have been infected.

For developers and companies with a retail web presence, it is crucial to security test for in-the-wild vulnerabilities before a big day like Cyber Monday. And for customers, there are ways to protect yourself from attacks while online shopping. Here is Robert Bunge of VentureBeat’s best practices:

“Password Security – Strengthen and lengthen your passwords

Mix in numbers and special characters, and avoid proper names and sequential number strings (i.e. 12345). And don’t use ‘password’ as your password – the most popular password in 2011 was ‘password.’

The username and password combination is the most typical way to prove your identity on the web, but weak and ineffective passwords open the door for identity theft. The first general rule of password construction is to make it long. A short password can be cracked easily by a high speed program.

Use different passwords on different web sites and change them every so often. Failure to do this means loss of a password by one merchant could expose your accounts on all the others. Passphrases are a good way to generate strong, yet memorable passwords. Here is one example: ‘Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light’ becomes ’0Scucb+de1.’

Trusted Websites – Only shop on reputable sites

Look for the SSL certificate and ensure the site starts with https:// and has a padlock icon.

The risks of shopping online are similar to face-to-face transactions. About.com offers the following general tips to minimize your risk. First, debit cards are the worst non-cash option. Why? If the card is stolen or the goods are not shipped, you are on the hook for any fraud or loss. PayPal and credit cards offer more robust dispute resolution and fraud prevention. PayPal will appeal to those who do not like to give out a credit card number. However, if PayPal is tied directly to your bank account, you need to monitor for suspicious activity in that account.

One good technique when considering a new merchant is to check that company name in one or more search engines. If the words ‘scam,’ ‘fraud,’ or ‘rip-off’ pop up, consider yourself duly warned! Also verify that the URL matches the merchant. Scammers often load the left-hand side of the URL with real company names to lure you in.

Payment – Use only one form of payment: a credit card

Putting your debit card information online opens up details to your checking account. Consider using sites with the PayPal and VeriSign icons. Having a dedicated credit card for online shopping is a good idea; it helps you spot problems and reduces your risk to other accounts.

Secured Networks – Never shop on an open Wi-Fi network

If the network is open, your information is open.”

 To read the rest click here. What’s your favorite site for Cyber Monday shopping? Let us know in the comments section.

It’s safe to say that social media and mobile apps will play a role in future elections. Ever since Barack Obama’s smashing Get Out the Vote campaign in 2008 that took advantage of Twitter and other media for reaching younger voters there was no chance of going back – candidates would have to embrace new technology if they wanted to keep up. The lead up to the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election saw mobile apps, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, you name it. Unfortunately, this year’s race also saw poorly tested apps that proved why testing, particularly in-the-wild testing, is so critical.

The final nail in the coffin came when the Mitt Romney campaign’s field polling apps failed on multiple levels on Election Day. Named Orca, the web app was intended to let field pollers track Republican turn out and target those who hadn’t voted yet. Unfortunately, nothing went quite as planned. Here’s the report from Ars Technica:

Volunteers couldn’t get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign’s headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack. …

While the system was stress-tested using automated testing tools, users received little or no advance training on the system. Crucially, there was no dry run to test how Orca would perform over the public Internet. …

Throughout the day, the Orca Web page was repeatedly inaccessible. It remains unclear whether the issue was server load or a lack of available bandwidth, but the result was the same: Orca had not been tested under real-world conditions and repeatedly failed when it was needed the most. …

Field volunteers also got briefed via conference calls, and they too had no hands-on with the application in advance of Election Day. There was a great deal of confusion among some volunteers in the days leading up to the election as they searched Android and Apple app stores for the Orca application, not knowing it was a Web app. …

Read more …

Photo from genbetasocialmedia.com

An accidental mass mailing to customers and prospects is every company’s worst nightmare, never mind a mass mailing that happens to reveal customers’ private data. This type of classic in-the-wild fail occurred this past week when HootSuite customers found their email inboxes flooded with hundreds of emails – either about a 60-day HootSuite Pro trial or containing the email information of other customers.

According to Louis Goddard of The Verge the real world glitch occurred when HootSuite was integrating with recent acquisition Seesmic:

“Ryan Holmes, CEO of social media management startup HootSuite, has offered customers a ‘product credit’ after an error in integrating new accounts exposed users’ names and email addresses. Some users reported receiving hundreds of emails reminding them that a 60-day HootSuite Pro trial period was about to end, despite having never signed up for such a trial — in many cases, the emails contained others users’ addresses in the ‘To:’ field.

According to a statement given to The Next Web, also posted on HootSuite’s website, the mass mailouts were caused by ‘a technical issue related to our integration of Seesmic accounts with our existing HootSuite user accounts.’ HootSuite acquired competitor Seesmic in September in an effort to boost its enterprise user base, part of the rush for the corporate market precipitated by Twitter’s controversial API changes, first proposed back in June. Holmes states that the credit will be offered as a ‘sign of our upmost [sic] respect’ in order to ‘make things right,’ though does not offer any details of its range or value.”

Luckily this type of real world technical disaster can be avoided with some in-the-wild testing. Share your thoughts on the incident in the comments section.

Although we are big proponents of in-the-wild testing, we are also advocates of in-the-lab testing. Why? Because certain bugs can easily be discovered before an application goes into production. Often times, they are the most obvious – and dangerous – defects.

That’s a tough lesson being learned by the US military, who is having problems with counterfeit technology making its way into hundreds of products.

Here’s CNN with the details:

A record number of tech products used by the U.S. military and dozens of other federal agencies are fake. That opens up a myriad of national security risks, from dud missiles to short-circuiting airplane parts to cyberespionage.

Despite laws designed to crack down on counterfeiters, suppliers labeled by the U.S. government as “high risk” are increasing their sales to federal agencies. Their presence in government’s supply chain soared 63% over the past decade, according to a new study released by IHS, a supply chain management consultancy.

Suppliers with the high-risk branding are known to engage in counterfeiting, wire fraud, product tampering and a laundry list of other illicit and illegal behaviors.

Last year, 9,539 banned businesses were found to have sold technology the government. Roughly 10% of those incidents involved counterfeit parts or equipment.

“What keeps us up at night is the dynamic nature of this threat, because by the time we’ve figured out how to test for these counterfeits, they’ve figured out how to get around it,” said Vivek Kamath, formerly the head of Raytheon’s supply chain operations. “It’s literally on almost a daily basis they change. The sophistication of the counterfeiting is amazing to us.”

Read the Rest >>>

Leading up to Blackberry 10′s release early next year RIM has been working with wireless carries around the globe to ensure the newest mobile device – which brings some pretty big changes to Blackberry – will work properly in the real world. Here’s what Reuters has to say about the testing efforts:

Research In Motion said … it has begun carrier testing of its new line of BlackBerry 10 devices, a crucial step ahead of next year’s launch of the make-or-break line of smartphones.

“In the last week, BlackBerry 10 achieved lab entry with more than 50 carriers, a key step in our preparedness for the launch of BlackBerry 10 in the first quarter of 2013,” Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said in a brief statement. …

Testing with carriers typically runs two to three months and lets telecom players test the compatibility of the new devices with their networks.

“This process will continue in the coming months as more carriers around the world formally evaluate the devices and our brand new software,” said Heins.

Read the full report from Reuters >>>

That’s right – advances in medical technology are bringing fiction to reality. Take a look at this video of the Bebionic3, a carbon fiber mechanical hand that can be controlled by upper arm muscle. This amazing device is being tested by users in-the-wild, and this video of Nigel Ackland is one example of these real life tests:

If an in-the-wild test is successful, Microsoft’s new tablet may be getting a leg up in the market. Electronic voting company Democracy Live tested the Surface tablet as a balloting device in Charlottesville, VA during Tuesday’s election. Here are the details of the test, from GeekWire:

Democracy Live uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-based platform, and the Surface is running the company’s “LiveBallot” application through the browser.

The web app lets the voter use the Surface to access, mark, and print a ballot for tabulation by a separate machine.

For now it’s just one Surface in one precinct in Charlottesville, Va. However, Democracy Live CEO Bryan Finney says the company plans to work with Microsoft on a broader rollout of Surfaces following the upcoming release Surface for Windows 8 Pro, which will run legacy Windows applications on traditional Intel processors. (The current Surface for Windows RT runs on an ARM processor, so it doesn’t support legacy apps.)

The idea with the Virginia test is to get feedback in advance of that broader rollout. …

Advantages include Windows 8′s built-in screen-reading functionality, plus USB support to enable sip-and-puff input devices for people with disabilities.

Read the full article at GeekWire >>>

So next election, if you see Microsoft Surface in place of the old electronic voting booths, you’ll know the real-life test was a success!

As posted earlier to the Software Testing Blog by Mike Brown, it appears that certain voting machines are altering votes in-the-wild. A man posted a video of the politically-biased software bug just hours ago to YouTube. Here is a blurb from his description of the incident:

“I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.”

Check out the video:

Tablets are used primarily on-the-go and it’s no surprise that they take a beating in-the-wild. Currently, it seems the three tablets of choice boil down to the small and decently priced Nexus 7, the new iPad Mini which follows in the Nexus 7’s model in terms of size and cost, and the larger, more expensive iPad 3. So, how do these tablets stack up against each other in terms of durability?

Lauren Goode of AllThingD recently shared this video from SquareTrade of their very own “Drop Bot” giving the tablets a run for their money:

What is your tablet of choice? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section.