Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

The non-bovine examples are in a way more complex (but also more common), since they involve multiple possible causes for an event. In software engineering, bugs and outages and so on are not just caused by lack of testing, but lack of failsafes, lack of fallbacks, coding on a Monday morning, cosmic background radation, too many/few meetings, etc. etc. And it's hard to pinpoint "the cause" (but perhaps we shed some light on a graph of causes, some of which may be "blocked" by other causes standing in the way).

Are there any good examples of gettiers in software engineering that don't rely on understanding causality, where we're just talking about "what's there" not explaining "how it got there"?

I would even say the two real-life examples given in the blog are not Gettier cases at all. Gettier is about the cause of the "knowledge," not about knowledge of the cause.

For the autofocus example, if the statement in question was "my patch broke the autofocus," it would not be Gettier because it is not true (the unrelated pushed changes did); if the statement in question was "my PR broke the autofocus," it would not be Gettier because it is JTB, and the justification (it was working before the PR, but not after) is correct, i.e., the cause of the belief, the perception, and deduction, are correct; Same if the statement in question was "the autofocus is broken."

It would be Gettier if the person reporting the bug was using an old (intact) version of the app but was using Firefox with a website open in another window on another screen, which was sending alerts stealing the focus.

The most common example of true Gettier cases in software dev is probably the following: A user reports a bug but is using an old version, and while the new version should have the bug fixed, it's still there.

The statement is "the current version has the bug." The reporter has Justified Belief because they see the bug and recently updated, but the reporter cannot know, as they are not on the newest version.