The term ‘Hackerphobia’ may be considered as a slang but it’s the No.1 concern of the people in the software business. There is a possibility that if you are in the software industry and quality is your main objective, you must be lacking sleep due to the fear of hackers attacking your application, hovering in your mind.
But an article in TechWeek suggests, software developers should actually fear the software bug over the software hacker. Entomophobia, as it’s called, although not in the strict sense of the term.
Here are a few key excerpts on the above issues:
In general the headlines that grab attention are – cyber attacks and cyber war, but a bigger threat to data security could be the software glitch. And the cause of this glitch is the data itself – or rather the sheer amount of it stored in our databases.
Databases – which are a store of our innumerable data, are so huge that it becomes almost impossible to refresh them regularly or run tests frequently in order to fix errors at the earliest. The outcome leads to more frequent and more dangerous software glitches. Whilst at the same time threats from large scale cyber-attacks should not be overlooked. For majority of the software companies, the threat of a software glitch presents a much clearer danger.
Why are these kinds of hitches occurring much more frequently than ever before? The reason most of the times is based on insufficient testing. When the storage boxes – databases, are as large and complex as they are today, trying to duplicate and refresh data sets for testing becomes far difficult to manage. Lots of time is consumed by I.T. teams to respond to requests for the duplication of databases for testing. And in lieu of the several requests, the teams in some cases, can’t fulfill the requests at all. Developers are pushed to finish projects faster as per the deadlines, but often I.T. teams can’t meet their demands which results in minimal testing of applications before they go live.
There’s another clause – for instance, even if the I.T. departments provide copies of databases for testing, by the time a copy is available, the data is obsolete. Refreshing a single testing data set can takes days, so most tests are unable to use data which is up to date to be risk or hassle free.
Inherent risks are always possible to occur if we implement a new application to put a pause to hiccups in the software. But a little more can be done to stop these issues. Software companies need to make testing a priority and equip their I.T. teams with technology and resources that will enable them to test often and on recent/latest data. Neglecting testing or using obsolete data can have dire consequences as mentioned above.
image credit: computerworld
