Could Recent Advancements in AI Technology Have Prevented The Largest IT Outage In History?

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Jul 26, 2024, 10:30 ET

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
[email protected]

SOURCE AgileAI Labs, Inc.