On August 1 , 2012 , Knight Capital was listed on the New York Stock Exchange ( NYSE ) in just 45 minutes, due to a bug left over , which led to the wrong execution of more than 4 million trading orders, involving as many as 154 ticker symbols , conducted about 10% of the trading volume of the US stock market, lost 440 million US dollars, and then fell into a business crisis, and was eventually merged by the competitor GETCO .
And this dead butcher knife was swayed by Knight Capital himself.
Since the concept of "Internet + " was put forward, Internet technology has been more like a trickle, quietly soaking through the skeleton of all walks of life, and finally taking on a new look. In various transformations and transformations, mobile applications have brought more space for business diversification, and many traditional industries have built their businesses on this platform. But for many industries, especially the financial securities field that integrates traditional trading methods with Internet technology, the potential problems in the APP often become the executioner who declares death.
Although there will be bugs in every APP and cannot be completely eliminated, in fact, treating the quality management link with a rigorous attitude can also minimize losses. For example, Google's applications and services, which serve billions of users around the world, are so stable and high-quality, which is inseparable from their rigorous and powerful testing team. For such giant enterprises, the ratio of development and testing is 4 : 1 , while the domestic Internet company is 9 : 1 .
Domestic Internet companies have always advocated the idea of "focusing on R&D and ignoring testing". Many large-scale companies often paranoidly believe that compared with the profitability of the investment model itself, code development specifications and daily operation and maintenance rules can be temporarily Put it aside first, and it may be too late to look back at these basic aspects when problems arise. For transformed Internet companies, especially in the financial industry that is rapidly popularizing "programmed transactions", such The situation may be even worse: most people in charge want to see the rapid prototyping of the product go live and put it into operation, often launching a new program quickly without proper testing, only to hurt themselves in the end.
But in fact, testing and development are not separate. Generally speaking, the last link of development is testing. A complete product should be produced by a complete process. It is no exaggeration to say that if the testing process is ignored, the final output should be a semi-finished product. This environment will cost you " 440 million".
What's more serious is that for the traditional financial securities industry that has been transformed, there are bugs in the newly launched applications, which may not only cause direct economic losses, but also damage the brand image. The loss of 440 million is not easily caused by every incident, but the good brand image accumulated by traditional financial and securities companies in the past is likely to be greatly reduced due to an "application accident", which is very important for any company. A fatal blow that cannot be measured in money. So instead of taking such a risky adventure, it is better to spend a very small price in advance and do a good job of testing.
In TestBird's view, doing a good job of testing is not only to avoid possible losses, but also to reflect an enterprise's attitude towards refinement. In this era, while mobile APPs bring infinite possibilities, they can also make you lose your energy due to a single drop.