Posts tagged disasters

I’ve heard of so many Software disasters but no hardware disasters! Why?!

Consider the famous story of the Ariane 5 Rocket which was launched by the European Space Agency. It exploded just forty seconds after its lift-off! It took about a decade of development and cost $7 billion. The reason for the explosion was a simple software error, a floating point conversion! They stored things in 64-bit number and they had to do floating point calculations and after that they stored things back in 16-bit number!

And this what happened!

But why there is no so much hardware disasters. The reason is because of the nature of  Software. Software outlives hardware and can last forever. If we get a faulty hardware component, we send it back to the manufacture and they will replace it for us. So there is no upgrade here! The culture around hardware is that when you ship it, it has to work. On the other hand, if software doesn’t work, we expect some sort of enhancement over time, update or upgrade to fix the bugs.

Software must conform to any kind of change, whether new hardware, new regulations and policies, etc. Legacy software systems must work no matter what changes can happen, whereas old hardware gets thrown away and replaced by completely new ones. 

The bottom line is that building software is hard and this is why there are so many software disasters.