The new law will give the Information Commissioner Office the rights to issue “tough fines” up to £17million, or 4% of global turnover for breaches of data law.

David Emm, principal security researcher, Kaspersky Lab, said: “The drafting of a new Data Protection Bill would grant unprecedented rights for consumers to force social media websites and online companies to delete their data and take back control of their personal information.”

Consumers will have the legal right to force social media companies and online traders to delete any unwanted content by the end of summer.

“In combination with the incoming General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) being implemented by the European Union, there will be widespread changes in the coming years to the way organisations collect, store and process data,” announced Emm.

Theresa May revealed plans to give people the right to request social media deletion during the Conservatives’ election campaign, and the Queen’s speech promised the legislation.

‘The public should embrace the new freedom’

“It is important that the general public embraces this new freedom and recognises the value of personal data – not just to ourselves but to would be cyber criminals,” said Emm.

“New data protection laws are designed to make organisations more careful with our data, but regardless of this, it is important that we, on an individual level, know what information is being kept and how it’s being handled – which will also reduce the likelihood of it falling into the wrong hands,” added Emm.

Emm also noted: “Being vigilant online – whether when using a work computer, home laptop, mobile or tablet device – should be second nature. Undertaking simple steps, like regularly changing passwords, reviewing default settings on social media and using anti-virus software across all devices can significantly help protect data.”

Written by Leah Alger

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Pornhub employees checked data from 5000 public profiles manually and showed algorithms of men and women all different ages interacting differently through post comments and writing styles, in a bid to search those lying about gender and age on other websites.

‘Women are more likely to deceive than men’

According to the study, women are more likely to deceive than men, with 40% of users lying about their age and 25% lying about their gender.

“Adult websites are populated by users who claim to be other than who they are, so these are a perfect testing ground for techniques that identify catfishes,” said Dr Walid Magdy, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics.

“What was interesting was that it seems that for many the reason for lying was to get more friends and subscribers,” he added.

According to consumer group Which, the majority of dating website users have encountered at least one fake profile, with people deceived by dating scams reaching the highest in 2016.

Edited from source by Leah Alger

Source: BBC

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In a bid to streamline the content development process, they addressed team challenges, such as being asked to support new projects, competing priorities and bottlenecks and silos, but in an agile fashion.

According to Milcetich, working in agile allows resources to be shifted, whatever the users need. “If it’s tax season and we need to make major updates to our tax content, we can now more easily pull anyone from the team to support that effort. We’re able to balance resources to match priorities and work in a more proactive, rather than reactive, manner,” she added.

Culture change

In this case, switching to agile implies grooming backlog requests, holding bi-weekly sprint planning meetings and retrospectives and using a board to track work in progress.

“It was a big change in the way we work. Our previous model had been based on a newsroom-style operation where people were clustered together around specific areas of content to use the journalism terminology,” admitted Milcetich.

“The newsroom model works really well for media outlets with bigger teams of people, but for a small government content team, it wasn’t the best fit because it didn’t easily allow people to support projects or user needs not on their beat.”

In order to keep things moving, employees regularly communicate about the status of work and roadblocks.

“While our process isn’t perfect, and we’re certainly still learning as we go, operating in a more agile manner has helped us focus our priorities and deliver content that will help our users accomplish their tasks,” said Milcetich.

Written from blog post by Leah Alger

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Introducing DevOps

Until a few years ago, organisations used to follow the waterfall method as part of the software lifecycle. The waterfall method is a step-by-step process, beginning with requirements analysis and ending with the delivery and implementation of the end product. This process, however, resulted in defective software pieces and would generally not be exactly what the product owner had in mind.

The mismatch took place mainly due to two reasons:

1. While the changes were being implemented one after the other, testing was performed only for critical response paths.
2. Once the software development process began, few requirements were deemed impossible to implement owing to system or process constraints.

Agile methodology took care of this flaw by ensuring that the product was developed in increments and was delivered for the product owner’s approval. Naturally, this helped teams work in a collaborative manner and kept the customer in loop. DevOps was introduced to further solidify the concept behind agile methodology. DevOps is looked upon as an opportunity to improve the delivery of a software application throughout the organisation.

Digital businesses have been on the rise lately, with leading organisations across industries looking to leverage the digital platform. Whether in the form of a mobile application, or as a form of interaction via the social media platforms, businesses are definitely going digital. This is giving them further opportunities to improve operations even after the software or product hits the market. The rise of digital businesses is a major factor that presses for faster release cycles.

Although there is no standard definition for the term “DevOps”, there is a unanimous agreement on the concept of DevOps. Essentially, DevOps puts emphasis on cross-collaboration and effective communication between software development teams and Information Technology stakeholders.

Doing DevOps the right way demands a conducive environment, one that helps automate release cycles and assures to accelerate the time-to-market of applications. There are many tools being provided by expert vendors that highlight various elements that make up for a conducive DevOps environment, covering the aspects of continuous integration, performance testing, release management, etc. It is just as important to create the culture of DevOps and understand how it would benefit in the organisational structure. Some of these aspects have been discussed in detail in this article.

By 2020, 50% of global enterprises will have implemented at least one application release automation solution, up from less than 10% today.
– Gartner

Doing DevOps right

Automation is key, especially when aiming for effective collaboration across teams. The automation aspect of DevOps in particular is garnering much attention over recent times. DevOps Release Management has become the topic of discussion and the point of strategy for CTOs and CIOs of many leading organisations. There are many start-ups that offer various products pertaining to release management. The release management solutions being provided by vendors are typically integrated with other open source, test, and build tools. This leads to customised solutions and tailor-made processes, and offers points of distinction for businesses.

The DevOps Release Management backdrop contains the following key areas among development, testing, and operations processes:

• Release management – Release management is fundamentally the entire process of managing, planning, scheduling, and controlling a software product through various stages and environments, including testing and deploying software releases.
• Integration across platforms – Although it is vital that an application or software is developed without bugs, it is equally crucial that the cross-platform integration is seamless. Whether it is being compatible across devices, or maintaining uniformity across software systems, the integrity of the software must be rigorously tested and seamless operational excellence is necessary to establish it in the market.
• Application lifecycle management – The application lifecycle starts with requirements gathering and extends to bug fixes and software updates long after the application hits the market. The whole lifecycle management requires robust testing techniques and effective tools to accelerate the overall operations process.
• Performance testing and monitoring – Performance testing assesses the functionality of a product and ensures that the users achieve the specifically desired results; while performance monitoring is on the operations end, making sure that the product or software is not impacted due to a sudden flow of traffic or other external factors.
• Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) – The process of CI and CD can either be manual or automated. Exploratory and user acceptance testing are manually done, while performance testing is typically done through automation.
• Continuous testing and DevTestOps: The age of customer that it is today, demands a steady, automated and intelligent testing that happens continuously. The paradigm of DevOps mandates continuous testing to ensure quality and speed become a paired option that is assured than becoming a choice. DevTestOps which is completely automation driven and which ensures the entire aspect of quality engineering starts early left in the cycle makes this a reality.

Creating a culture of DevOps

Culture plays a key role in the implementation of DevOps; however, this aspect is grossly overlooked. Although it makes sense to focus on the technical aspects of Agile and DevOps, it is essential to understand that accurate results can only be achieved through collaborative effort.

How does the cultural aspect help?

• It brings everyone on-board – Typically, organisations consist of several departments that work together to meet deliverables and continue to obtain business. By having an in-depth understanding of what DevOps brings to the table, and discussing how each team can contribute, team members will have a new-found appreciation for the implementation of this process.
• Work gets done with higher efficiency – Understanding that effective communication and collaborative effort is required can help get things done with higher efficiency. It is important for the team members to understand that they need to help out other teams, and that they are not pitted against one another in the process. The software developer cannot be threatened by a QA engineer, and the Operations executive needs to be open-minded when the developer suggests an alternative strategy.
• It helps employees align with company’s objectives – It is important to understand how an organisation is portraying itself in the market. It helps all employees understand the current market strategy, so that the message is spread wide and clear. This helps excellently with brand building and, subsequently, brand recall.

How can organisations nurture DevOps culturally?

• Leverage the power of social media – By being active on social media, employees can gain different perspectives about DevOps, and what it means to teams working in different departments.
• Company sessions, conferences, and events – When organiations have employees working together but are not co-located, it is important to bring them together for sessions, conferences, and events based on the theme of DevOps. This helps solidify the commitment of working towards a common goal.
• Emphasis on document and professional terminology – It is important to correct and insist on using terminology related to DevOps right from the initial stages. It helps cement knowledge around the topic and can make a tremendous difference while communicating with clients and prospective leads.

In conclusion

According to industry leaders, release automation tools enable best practices for applications. They help reduce complexity and standardises processes. Manual processes have been acknowledged as severely prone to errors and delay releases significantly. A faster application release, quicker time to market, and longer sustainability gives organisations an edge and keeps them relevant in the market scenario. In the year of 2017, and over the next few years, this is a trend that will only be on the rise. Quality engineering and quality assurance delve into the system architecture and ensure that the end-to-end functionality and integrity of the application is maintained. DevTestOps will be a key enabler for completeness for DevOps and Cigniti Technologies consists of a team of SDETS and experts that have done extensive research on accelerating the process of testing by maintaining software quality as the primary objective.

Edited for web by Jordan Platt.

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Digital technology straddles across industries, permeates our existence, and affords us inconceivable possibilities with profound implications – from 24×7 connectivity, to latency-free, real-time collaboration and online transactions. Thanks to the internet of things, entities in the real and virtual worlds are now interconnected seamlessly, and the boundaries between them are ever more blurred. For businesses, this eradication of latency, coupled with instant digital commerce and internet of things, removes inefficiencies, but also introduces risks. There is minimal margin for error, rendering the cost of failure exponentially high, and resulting in frenetic churn-rate for overnight brands.

The digital mode of delivery has levelled the global playing field – a clear example being the rapid penetration of cellular networks, in both developed and developing markets. This profusion of mobile devices is part of a broader trend of technology becoming cheaper and more widespread. With everything online, batch and offline processes have become redundant. Today, there are five digital forces driving social and business change, and promising a more open and democratic society.

The five digital forces driving social and business change

Mobile and Pervasive Computing

The first is Mobile and Pervasive Computing. These small devices liberate us from the desktop and allow us to remain connected and transact wherever we are on the planet, whether socially or with the market. With everything online, batch and offline processes have become redundant. Providing assurance for this new world is challenging, because there is no tolerance for failure. The need – continuous assurance for mobile and handheld environments.

The Cloud

This leads to the second of the five forces – the Cloud, which provides access to scalable storage and processing anywhere on the planet, subject to jurisdictional differences relating to data-privacy. Distributed computing has shaken up data centres and shifted the business model for software and hardware services to that of a utility, like water or electricity. I discussed in my article ‘The Digital Default’ in TEST Magazine February 2015 issue, that providing assurance for the Cloud means tackling the challenges of reliability, availability, security and integrity, to ensure that transactions over a large distributed network are not dissipated, corrupted or diluted. The Cloud presents a clear need for continuous testing of virtualised environments and data security.

Big Data and Analytics

The third Force is Big Data and Analytics – the volume and variety of data generated every minute, thanks to connected devices and social media – driving insightful analysis and differentiation for competitive advantage. Assurance, in this context, means sustaining brand reputation and therefore customer loyalty. Enter data validation and verification for big data assurance.

Artificial intelligence and robotics

Artificial intelligence and robotics is the fourth of the five forces. Self-learning systems and robotics can deliver a highly efficient and automated transactional capability. When human activity is replaced with algorithms or robotic processes, the onus of preventing malfunction is on the assurance-provider. Managing this risk requires calibrating the correct balance between the probability of an error, and the negative impact of the error. Enter assurance in the assembly line.

Social Media

The fifth force is Social Media, which is used by many companies for advertising campaigns. The power of social media to demolish barriers to participating in public conversations is one that cannot be undermined. Assuring the success of social media campaigns necessitates a return-on-investment (ROI) calculation and the end-to-end assurance of ROI. Setting the metrics for the campaign, collecting feedback from customers, and building correlations from that data against sales, while accounting for exogenous factors, is key to measuring the success of social media advertising. Assurance for social media advertising calls effective keyword research and contextual analysis, persuasive landing page content and intuitive web design – a clear case for usability and human factors – both, applied areas of assurance.

Implications for data privacy

These digital forces have profound implications for data privacy. Demarcating the line between private and public data is critical to ensuring client confidentiality and data security. Part of the solution for mitigating data security and confidentiality risks, lies in self-regulation by companies. Specifically for IT firms, protection of customer information should be top priority. Complete confidentiality has become the de-facto customer expectation – second nature to the IT industry and the information economy. The applied area of information assurance has gained importance. So long as the need for privacy and confidentiality is respected, the digital revolution promises a more open, more democratic society. Digital has become the new default mode of delivery.

As these forces merge, they present challenges such as physical safety, information security, and multiple failure points. But assurance too, with its applied areas, is rapidly evolving to manage the speed and volume of these digital forces.

An earlier version of this blog was published at #ThinkAssurance, the quality assurance (QA) and testing blog of Tata Consultancy Services.

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