Carnegie Quality

History’s Worst Software Bugs, an article from Wired News, is making a lot of people’s blogs. If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it.

I’ve never had an experience with someone dying from a project I was on, but here’s my story. Back in the mid-90′s I was working at a telecommunications firm managing the development of a custom client-server VB application. It was an order-entry system for ISDN that interfaced to the telco’s Service Order mainframe. We had just gone live when the mainframe had an abend. If you haven’t worked with mainframes before, an abend is bad news – think blue screen of death, only much, much worse. After some investigation it was determined that our application sent over a carriage return, which crashed the mainframe. We then did some investigation and found that a user had opened up Notepad to write some comments and then pasted the comments, with carriage returns, into the comments field in our application, which we merrily sent along to the mainframe. Needless to say we both modified code to strip out carriage returns, but it goes to show that if there’s a way to break your software, you can be sure users will find it!

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