Software Development — Some 404 Stories
In the 21st century, the world lives and breathes Software Development. Life wouldn’t be the same right now without the major breakthroughs of technology in general and Software Engineering in particular. You wouldn’t even be able to read this article if it wasn’t for software wizardry. That said, as in all really important aspects of life, you celebrate the wins but take notes of the failures, so you won’t fail again. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest Software Development fails of recent history.
NASA’s interpretation of LOST
It was 1998 when NASA actually lost the Climate Orbiter spacecraft. How? From a simple mistake in calculations. Someone on the software team just failed to make the right conversion from English to metric units. That simple failure led to the disappearance of the $125 mil craft, which allegedly “crashed” into Mars’ atmosphere.
The Bug-Thief
It’s 2016 and we’re in Bangladesh. There a group of hackers managed to transfer over $81 mil in 4 transactions. Why? Because… printer. It’s that simple. There was a printer set up to print all transactions made, as an extra security step. An error caused it to miss these transactions, making the thieves a lot richer.
Heathrow luggage unclaimed
You’d think that 12,000 tests should be enough for everything, wouldn’t you? Well, they weren’t. Before the big opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, engineers run vast amounts of tests for their baggage handling system. They even tried out 12,000 baggages, just to be sure. But on the day of the opening the system failed. Miserably. It could be due to various reasons, such as unpredicted passenger behaviour, while picking up bags and leaving them again on the carriage. The results? More than 42,000 bags went missing and more than 500 flights got cancelled.
A worm called Morris
Travelling back to 1998, we have a case of a “harmless” experiment gone wrong. So wrong that thousands of computers crashed because of this coding error. It is thought to be the first wide worm attack on the Internet. The name of the “coder”: Robert Tappan Morris, who gave his name to the accidental worm and who then took a position as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Well, everyone loves Software Development, let alone us. But, it’s no secret that these kinds of errors make us want to always improve. How do you feel about Software Development? Would you like to work for a company that gets it? Check out our current openings.
Sources:
raygun.com
computerworld.com
readwrite.com
