13. The many kinds of software failures
There was a human test driver behind the wheel, but video from the car’s dash cam published by SF Chronicle shows that they were looking down, not at the road, in the seconds leading up to the crash.
Police say that the car didn’t try to avoid hitting the woman. (Vaas, 2018)
Uber car software detected woman before fatal crash but failed to stop (Opens in a new window)
The Max has been grounded since March 2019, after some badly written software caused two crashes that killed 346 people. (Campbell, 2020)
The ancient computers in the Boeing 737 Max are holding up a fix (Opens in a new window)
Multiple defects in Toyota’s engine software directly caused a September 2007 single vehicle crash that injured the driver and killed her passenger. (Barr, 2013)
An Update on Toyota and Unintended Acceleration (Opens in a new window)
Truly catastrophic software failures rarely get discovered in a sprint review or shipping retrospectives. The serious bugs that induce panic attacks only appear once the software is distributed widely enough to begin to experience edge cases. Most of the time, that only happens long after the software development team has moved on and marked the project as successful or challenged.
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