“Guess how many pieces of gum Beth chewed last year. “
In September school starts. This semester I am only taking one class, CS780 Software Reliability and Testing. I’ll be posting some notes about the class and some homework here. Join in the discussion to help me get an A.
First up is an assignment about DSC Communication Corp. and problems with telephony code.
Notes on the paper, “Testing Time Cut on Software Linked to Phone Outages.” Balt. Sun , Leslie Cauley:
- They took the risk that they didn’t need to test the changes. What risk management did they have in place? What processes and procedures allowed them to accept the changes?
- Would the changes have been caught in the first place? Did they have tests to catch this type of problem? Did they have regression testing? Would their test plan have caught this issue?
- It was rather costly issue: 200 engineers on a bug hung!
- How old is the system in use?
- There was a mention of the regulation of the industry prevented them from acting quickly to identify the problem. Why is that an issue? Can’t the Bells ask for better testing from their suppliers? Insist on it in their contracts?
Links to more information:
- comp.risks digest forum post about the root cause.
- A Google Search for any information about this problem.
- More about the liability issues facing the company.
- More about the problem
If you have any help, please post it in comments.
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Talk about getting exercise by jumping to conclusions.
The software your talking about was real time telcom software. “Patches” [which were hexadecimal codes to change the software code dynamically, on the fly] were used to make dynamic changes to operations software. Knowing the risks that this entailed, several procedural steps were in place to have each “patch” checked by at least two other programmers, before inserting a patch into the running system.
What happened? The procedure wasn’t followed by the one person putting in the patch. Simple as that.
Now dear writer, what “policy and procedure” do you propose to fix the problem that a programmer simply screwed up? Shoot the programmer? Fire him?
In fact, what we did was to immediately reward the entire team [including the offending programmer] who quickly isolated the source of the problem. We did that to avoid the temptation to play the blame game, which the media was hyping. [And 15 years later, you seem to be doing also.]
And several months later, the key Bell Companies affected by the outages, visited DSC headquarter to give out awards to the people who made the mistake.
Why did the affected customers do that? Because the people developing the SCP code were truly one of the finest groups of programmers around.
Lastly, the outages created a huge political climate in DC, so anything you read about this topic is certain to be clouded by that environment.
Be careful before drawing conclusions based on very limited accounts in the media.