Faulty Software Can Be Grist For The Horror Story Mill

October 3rd, 2006

One effective way to squeeze out some precious few drops of schadenfreude from your heart of hearts is this edge-of-your-seat list of how mistakes in programming can make heads roll and aircraft fall from the sky.

To list the top 7:

1. The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed in September 1999 because of a “silly mistake”: wrong units in a program.

2. The 1988 shooting down of the Airbus 320 by the USS Vincennes was attributed to the cryptic and misleading output displayed by the tracking software.

3. Death resulted from inadequate testing of the London Ambulance Service software.

4. Several 1985-7 deaths of cancer patients were due to overdoses of radiation resulting from a race condition between concurrent tasks in the Therac-25 software.

5. Errors in medical software have caused deaths. Details in B.W. Boehm, “Software and its Impact: A Quantitative Assessment,” Datamation, 19(5), 48-59(1973).

6. An Airbus A320 crashes at an air show.

7. A China Airlines Airbus Industrie A300 crashes on April 26, 1994 killing 264. Recommendations include software modifications.

Read the full list here.

via DZONE