Spark IT 2010: A software bug can kill you literally

BANGALORE, INDIA: When we develop a software we know how horrible it is and how essential the code quality is. In many cases software requires ‘five nines’, which means only five minutes of downturn is allowed in a year. This is because software usage is wider and very critical.

According to S G Ganesh, Member Technical Staff, Siemens Corporate Technology, software bugs are serious issues. They are similar to ice-bergs, as most of them are hidden. Known software bugs are only 1/10th of all.

Some seemingly trivial bugs can be disastrous. While talking at Spark IT 2010 here today, Ganesh listed out a few examples of historical disasters due to bugs.

In 1996, Ariane 5 rocket blasted within minutes of take-off due to software bug. There was error because of conversion from float int and in Ada, which results in an overflow exception.

In 1991, during the Gulf war, an American missile called Patriot missed intercepting incoming Scud missile, which resulted in the death of 28 soldiers while over 100 injured. The cause for this was detected as an inaccurate calculation of time since Boot, due to computer arithmetic errors.

AT&T’s whole network was down for nine hours due to software switch caused networks of computers to fail.

Microsoft’s Zune player froze on December 31, 2008 due to a simple bug in the software. The code was written in such a way that it would never terminate if the year is leap year and day’s value is 366.

Software sugs are serious and it is difficult to ensure code quality. The first thing a programmer needs to realize is the cost of code quality. The next thing is, testing is not a solution for creating quality software, so over reliance on testing does not pay off.

Testing can only show the presence of bugs, not their absence; for 99.9 per cent of inputs the bugs would go undetected during testing.

It is also unfair to blame developers for software failures. Managers too are responsible and play a great role in creating quality software.

With so much of complexity in software, it’s no surprise that there can be failures. The surprise is that it passes those failures.

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