The software bug all stars - and what we can learn from them
summary
Mars Climate Orbiter loses a $300 million probe because teams mix imperial vs si units and management blocks a fast fix; Therac-25 delivers fatal radiation overdoses from a race condition and single-developer QA; Microsoft Zune and iOS alarms fail over date formatting and week-based years; a fighter jet control system collapses crossing the International Date Line; Boeing 787 requires a reboot every 51 days because unbounded historical data accumulates. Lessons: make units explicit, add types and validation, use libraries for dates, enforce reviews, meaningful errors, and clean up resources.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Software bugs as trophies
- 2:09Cost of software bugs
- 3:35Mars Climate Orbiter failure
- 8:57Trust your team
- 10:00Therac-25 overdoses
- 13:55Solo dev dangers
- 16:26Safeguards and humility
- 19:35Microsoft Zune failure
- 22:06Date/time handling complexity
- 24:15Boeing 787 memory leak
- 25:18Key takeaways
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