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The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

(thedailywtf.com)
449 points lemper | 2 comments | 27 Aug 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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vemv ◴[27 Aug 25 08:45 UTC] No.45036986[source]▶
My (tragically) favorite part is, from wikipedia:

> A commission attributed the primary cause to generally poor software design and development practices, rather than singling out specific coding errors.

Which to me reads as "this entire codebase was so awful that it was bound to fail in some or other way".

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1. rgoulter ◴[27 Aug 25 09:43 UTC] No.45037358[source]▶
Hmm. "poor software design" suggests a high risk that something might go wrong; "poor development practice" suggests that mistakes won't get caught/remedied.

By focusing on particular errors, there's the possibility you'll think "problem solved".

By focusing on process, you hope to catch mistakes as early as possible.

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2. DamonHD ◴[27 Aug 25 22:19 UTC] No.45046047[source]▶
When trying to make better systems in moderately-critical roles (investment banking, not medicine though) my approach was both try to understand and fix the immediate fault, but also find out if (and fix if so) any systemic issue that would make other related errors likely.