High Consequence Bugs

Sometimes you work on AI-driven Uber for Cats web app. You write a bug, someone gets an error message and moves on with their day.

Other times, you write a bug and people die.

This is an incomplete list of high-consequence bugs, that I can refer back to when people ask “why do we need to write tests?”

• British Post Office Scandal - A software bug resulting in thousands of suicides as a reuslt of miscarriage of justice.
• Boeing 737 Max Crashes - 346 people died in two air crashes as the result of a malfunctioning maneuver correction software (MCAS).
• Therac 25 - At least six people died as a result of poorly designed/tested radiation therapy software in the 1980s
• Intel’s $475 million error - In 1993, Intel released a new high-powered chip, which was later discovered to have a floating point division bug baked into the chip; the company eventually had no choice but to replace everyone’s faulty Pentium chips, costing them $475 million.