5 Most Embarrassing But Extremely Costly Bugs
The learnings every developer should always remember
Having bugs is an unavoidable part of software engineering. Teams learned how to minimize the number of problems in their products. They cover features with unit and integration tests. Along with the quality assurance engineers they regularly do testing sessions.
The number of critical issues becomes low, but unfortunately not zero. And in certain cases, simple and obvious bugs can cost a lot. Sometimes millions of dollars and sometimes human’s lives.
Let’s go through the list of simple and embarrassing bugs that caused big disasters in history.
Year 2000 Problem
The software engineering industry started developing rapidly in the 1950s. The main focus was on programming languages and how to run applications on limited computational power.
Back then the year 2000 sounded for us like 2100 nowadays. That is too far away in the future and we should not worry about it.
The situation became worrying in 1999. Many applications used only two digits to represent a year instead of four digits. For example, the year 1995 would be saved as 95. That was done to save memory as back then it was expensive.
