How can Buggy Software Lose you Thousands a Year

With the advancement in technology, work has been made quite easier to be done, this is with the development of software, cars, cell phones, trains and power plants are run by the software. However, at times the software can be corrupt due to poor programming that it will cause loss of money or even lives.

Bad coding is very costly and further it is lethal, for instance: in 1997, 228 people were killed in Guam, Korea due to a poorly programmed altitude warning system, in this case not only did the airline lose their plane, people lost their lives and therefore was more than costly.

Moreover, in the year 2000, 39,000 tractors and trucks and a further 6,000 school buses had to be recalled back to the assembly line due to the fact that their anti-lock brakes were made with a faulty software, the recall caused the car assembly to lose billions in cash since the buyer lost confidence in the brand of the truck, tractors and buses that they were making, if the vehicles had been used, then there would have been an increase in road carnage due to faulty braking systems.

Due to bad coding, the Mars Polar Lander was in 1999 destroyed as it was descending because faulty software shut off the engines as it was only 100 feet over the ground surface, the loss incurred was summed up to 165 million dollars.

Although the deaths caused by human error exceeds that of machine failure of faulty software, we are living in a modern world where all is run by software, for instance, the traffic lights are controlled by software. The use of the software is so relied upon that their quality is tolerated, even if it is not the best.

When developing software for the space shuttle, done by Neumann's group for NASA, they were careful that they produced only three lines of code per day; this is far less than the usual a million codes.

Software developers state that defects arise from: commercial pressure to bring to the market products faster, software complexity and poor methods of work. The programmers use half their entire developing time code writing and the other time; they are looking for errors and correcting them. With this in mind it has been established that programs have 5-10 defects per 1,000 lines of code, to correct this it would take 50 people annually to find all faults.

Consortium director Bill Guttman says that the problem is that unlike engineers, they do not have a system that measures the reliability of their programmes. The consortium wants to come up with automated tools that will analyze software and rate the reliability.

Former head of the Association for Computing Machinery Barbara Simmons says that for developers to produce quality software there should be a regulation that will hold them responsible for any failure of the software.

Barbara stated that if the software developers are not regulated then we will continue to hear of billions in losses or tragedies that have been caused by the bad coding.

Article Source: http://profitnb.com

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