Question

Please present not less than 5 classic stories about software bugs and give your idea about why software testing is important in software development.

Answer 1

Software Testing is one of the most important phases of the Software Development Life Cycle as no software can be considered as complete unless it does the job without any possibility of its failure whilst in use. And even the developer cannot guarantee the quality of his software unless he has tested it. If a software is not tested well, it can lead to software crash, data loss, and can even cause death.

The following incidents were very popular and signify the need for software testing before its being deployed:

1.  In 1991, Iraq shot a missile to the US's base in Saudi Arabia causing the deaths of 28 US Soldiers. After investigation, it was found that the antiballistic system of that base failed to work because its detection clock was running 0.33 seconds late due to which it couldn't launch the defense missile as 0.33 seconds can make a huge difference for a missile moving with the speed of 1.5 km/second.

2. A mars orbiter failed to successfully place in the orbit because the orbiter was using the metric system while the software controlling the probe was using the feet system of units causing a large error.

3. In 2003, a rocket launched started to deviate from the predicted path because the values in one of the formulas were mistakenly set to take integer values only. Hence, it was neglecting the decimal values causing the slight error which turned into a large error after a few seconds.

4. In the previous century, developers tried to save space by removing the first two digits from the "year" that is "19" from 1969 and place just 69. It was good for the whole century but when the century changed to 2000, the software was still stating 1900 leading to great havoc in banks and much time-dependent software.

5. In 1994, all the Pentium chipsets designed by Intel failed to do the math. All the calculations performed were correct till the 8th decimal value but were entirely wrong past 8th decimal due to error in floating-point values. This error was negligible for personal computers but turned out to be great sorrow for researchers and scientists.

Getting familiar with all of these stories and many more of this kind makes us think about the necessity of software testing before its deployment because not performing this crucial step correctly can cause the whole system to fail hence causing the whole project to end.

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