Shopping mall, EAS system and my eBay app

Do you know what is a RF EAS system works or how it works? I don’t. All I can tell you what is stands for- Electronic Article Surveillance  that uses Radio-frequency. Still not sure what that thing is? :) It’s the thing that you may have seen at the checkout point/ exit point of a shopping mall. Those  big bars that detect whether anybody is passing through without paying for the product. Used as Anti-Shoplifting device. May be the following picture would help visualizing what i’m talking about.

Picture Courtesy: checkpointsystems.com

If you are interested how RF EAS system works- read this article from howthingsworks.com. They have explained the system including different variation of the system.

Ok, now we get a visual idea what i’m talking about. Why i’m talking about it? for that i need to share a story with you all.

I was in a shopping mall, walking around, passing the time while my better half was shopping. I was on my phone with ebay app. Browsing for some cell phone, using the buy it now option. I was walking around, going in and out, looking at the search results on ebay app. You people have seen people texting and walking and fall into fountain or in awkward situations. I was kind of like that. I was paying more attention to my ebay and less where i’m heading to. I nearly bumped into one of those EAS RF bars. I stopped. Still was looking at the screen. Then I saw the most interesting thing. All on a sudden something as added to my cart. I didn't even touch anything. I did not do anything and it was adding/ creating touch effect on my ebay app and adding item to my ebay cart! And, it did not stop there, it even tried to buy the thing. I was so lucky that I did not have the payment method setup on my cell phone. That saved me buying a $250 worth of cell phone that I did not wanted/ submitted.

First I would like to rule out the possible hacking issue. I was not connected to shopping mall wifi and my NFC settings was off. What actually happened, I don't know. All I know, when I was close to one of those bar (possibly the transmitter), it sent some electromagnetic wave (which I was kind of feeling it when I was moving the phone around the bar). I was near to the top portion of the bar. It did not happen at the lower level.

When it happened first time, I did not believe it. Then I tried few other times, it did the same thing. May be it is nothing abnormal to people who has enough knowledge about the whole system, to me, as a layman, all I saw it adding stuff to my cart and tried to buy it. It could be related to cell phone having the capacitive touch screen and that electromagnetic field generated the pulse to mimic the touch behavior.  

I tried few other thing, tried from the lock screen- nothing happened, tried from the home screen- nothing, went to app menu screen and then it started the facebook app. Could have tried few more things and was trying to take a video of this, ended up being questioned by the security guards.

I was wondering about whole thing. How would I ever test scenarios that may happen in real world. There are n number of user scenarios in real life. All I could do think about some of them and test my product. Testing is my passion, so I try to think and share about the events in my QA professional life. I dont want to be just a Tester but a real life Tester.

QA person's feelings

Being a human being, it is very difficult to find or to have a mind set for finding issues out of anything in  life – both in professional and private life. I’m a human, not a bot. It easy to say put the QA hat when at profession and play different role when necessary. It may be easy to do it when you are doing positive work- development, business analyst, project management, test management. But when you are in the field, doing the actual work in QA, then it becomes critical. It needs different motivation to keep you smart enough to find issues.

 

I developed myself in a way that, whenever I see a product I start doing testing or think about all possible negative scenarios that can break the software. It just now happens automatically. Even when they say a user story, on the fly I start thinking about all possible scenarios. And most of the I found that, in the requirement or design level, not all possible scenarios are considered and sometimes when I report this kind of issue, it get stuck in the “it’s not in specs” term.

When I find issues, it excites me. Excites me to talk and report about it. It takes me one step ahead to reach towards my milestone for bugs. Nobody else will understand or care about how a tester feels about finding a bug, going forward towards the milestone. Think about it in real life, if you meet someone and noticed something, if you say that to that person, chances are s/he will react (by human nature). Nobody wants to hear bad things about them. Similarly when you are saying (reporting) something to developer about their child (code), s/he will react just like real life. So, who will then appreciate the work you are doing?

Honestly, I don't know. I got mixed appreciation from different level of people as well as I got opposite from the people I work with. When things turned down, like you brought up an issue, and they pushed it way down in the list, it actually demotivates me to bring up similar issue next time. So what I do and depend is on myself. I motivate myself to find issues, to make the goals for bugs.

Sometimes I get some feedback from the top management. To the top management, if it does not hurt anyone, then don’t hang up with testing, making the software perfect. If this is the mind set of top management, if this is how they think about the user, chances are they will earn very bad reputation in the industry once something happen. They see the testing as the most negligible piece in the software development.

As a tester, I never make any decision whether to release a software or not (especially working to commercial bank and/ or medical device company). I present them the facts, known issues for the stable testable product. Depending on many factors, it’s the top management’s decision whether to release the new product following a patch or not to care what happens afterwards as long as they can capture the market.

May not be an apple to apple comparison, but I would like to say something about the cellphone industry. Apple and Samsung- two rival company. One sues another to dominate the market. Samsung brought the smart watch product September 4 2013. They even brought another version in April 2014 [Source: Wikipedia]. And apple, introduced their watch on September 2014. Near about one year later than Samsung. Apple waited this long, to make it perfect not just to enter the market with new idea. I do not have the factual data with me, but I can guess not that many people bought the Samsung watch. And if Samsung's watch was that good than they did not have to introduce another watch within 6/7 months later. Apple’s products are much more dependable, less breakable than the rival party. So it’s not always about whether you can capture the market, you being the first to introduce something to the market. Ask any user, why they buy apple (other than apple’s crazy fans). I believe it would be the quality of Apple’s product.  

More or less, in general, we can guess the quality when we see the word "China" on a product. No offense, its not like they don't make great product, they does. I was just talking about general products. Think about a blender machine. China made blender are cheap in price. We can buy near about two China blender comparing to a known brand product. If people don't care about quality, they will end up buying blender for every 4 months rather buying one good quality one. Eventually it cost more and you cannot depend on it. Those who makes the comment "As long as it does not hurt people, we can fix it later" should be aware about this common sense example. QA helps to be proactive rather than reactive.