Question

Think of TWO examples of software project disasters. Write out what you think were the main causes of the disasters. Use your favourite web search engine to get to the bottom of the two disasters.
a. When did it take place?
b. Where did it occur?
c. What was the impact?
d. What was the main cause of the disaster?
e. How could it be avoided?

Answer 1

Hi,

1. The AT&T network collapse-
When - In 1990
Where - US
Impact - As a result of single switch getting down, 75 million phone calls across the US went unanswered . American Airlines alone estimated the impact it cost it 200,000 reservations
Cause -The cmain cause of the issue as a bug/error in the single line of programming code during the complex software upgrade.
How to avoid - The software code must be unit tested and then it has to be tested by SIT team(System Integration Testing Team).
The code then must be moved to pre-prod environment which is production like environment for testing purpose.

2. The explosion of the Ariane 5
When - 1996
Where - Europe
Impact - The impact cause the US satellite-launching rocket blown up just seconds after taking off . The total development of Ariane 5 cost more than $8bn (£4bn).
Cause - The issue occured because a software code was trying load a 64 bit value into a 16 bit storage.
How to avoid - The datatypes and number formats of the variable that are used in the software code needs to be carefully analysed and has to be cross verified against the specifications.
If there is a possibility of numeric overflow, we need to used the apropriate casting operations on the code to convert the lower datatypes to higher datatypes.

Thanks and Regards,

Vinay Prakash Singh