Quality Engineering

Consumers around the country have been sheltering in place for months and taking most of their shopping online—and the trend isn’t going anywhere. In fact, more consumers have shopped online since physical stores started re-opening than did when stores were still closed. The trend shows that online shopping growth isn’t going away and that brands need to re-assess their digital offerings to create the best experience possible.  More Consumers Buy Online As Stores Start To Reopen A new survey from PYMNTS found that nearly 36% of U.S. consumers are now buying retail goods online, compared to 29% doing so in mid-April when most brick-and-mortar stores were closed. The same is true for consumers ordering from restaurants online, even though many restaurants have started to open with more widespread dining options. The survey found 21% of consumers are now ordering online from restaurants, up from 13% in mid-April.  And those numbers are likely to stay steady or increase before they start t

WITH CLOUD STORAGE now so tightly integrated into desktop and mobile operating systems, we're all syncing more data to and from the cloud than ever before: our photos, videos, documents, passwords, music, and more. There are plenty of benefits to having access to all of your data anywhere and from any device, of course, but it does open the door to someone else getting at your files from a different device too. Here's how to keep that from happening. 1. Use Strong Passwords and Two-Factor Authentication All the standard security tips apply to your cloud accounts as well: Choose long and unique passwords that are difficult to guess, and use a password manager. Keep your passwords secret and safe and be wary of any attempts to get you to part with them (in an unexpected email, for example). You should also switch on two-factor authentication (2FA) if it's available (most popular cloud storage services now support it). Enabling 2FA means unwelcome visitors won't be able to

Bit by bit, we’re reopening the economy. No one knows how long it’ll take to get the economy back on track or what kind of regulations there will be to keep everyone safe. But we do know it’ll take a great deal of tech to get the machinery running again. Consumer expectations have changed. Many in-demand employees have learned how much they prefer the flexibility of working from home—so much so that startups and even large corporations are launching “work from home forever” plans (and we can expect companies in other sectors of the economy to follow), and they need to adjust their tech to make this possible. Digital transformation —the term we seem to be stuck with—will be the answer; companies that put it off now have to play catch-up. Everyone’s trying to regain lost customers. They also don’t want to lose their top employees, who now expect to have a remote workplace (or at least the option of one). We’re in a reluctant revolution, and many companies are short on cash because incomi

ASAPP founder Gustavo Sapoznik developed software that trains customer-service reps to be “radically” more productive, winning the young startup an $800 million valuation. If you’ve ever felt your blood boil  after sitting on hold for 40 minutes before reaching an agent . . . who then puts you back on hold, consider that it’s often even worse on the other end of the line. A customer-service representative for JetBlue, for instance, might have to flip rapidly among a dozen or more computer programs just to link your frequent-flier number to a specific itinerary. “Imagine that cognitive load, while you have someone screaming at you or complaining about some serious problem, and you’re swiveling between 20 screens to see which one you need to be able to help this person,” says Gustavo Sapoznik, 34, the founder and CEO of ASAPP, a New York City–based developer of AI-powered customer-service software . Sapoznik remembers just such a scene while shadowing a call-center agent at a “very large

Covid-19 thrust us into a new world where digital business is now often the only business. In response, longstanding digital transformation barriers — from regulatory compliance to internal resistance — were dismantled, and digital transformation is now more accessible than at any time in history. There's a tremendous opportunity to take this momentum and run with it, as long as one of the most common threats to rapid innovation isn't still holding your organization back. Breaking Through Barriers As CEO of a testing and automation platform, I'm keenly aware that the great impact on digital transformation is an unexpected by product of the pandemic. Often, crisis-related projects create a boot camp-like scenario that pushes enterprise organizations to their limits, revealing their agility to deliver software much faster than ever expected. Decades-old systems with all sorts of complex interdependencies and brittle code nobody understood couldn't be updated fast enough