Spirited away
Kolibri nearly goes ranting on the importance of doing software testing, as the Spirit-probe is now having communication troubles. I actually used to work for the space industry, testing software for spacecrafts. Even though the code was written by brilliant software engineers and tested, retested, and reretested by three times as many people as there were coders, there would still be bugs. Some of them were irrelevant, some of them were dangerous, and some simply crashed the software. Some were compiler problems, some were errors caused by cosmic radiation (randomly flipping bits in your return stack is rarely good for the stability), some were just simple "well, that can never happen" -errors, or "well, we never thought that would happen" -errors.
All software we ever make contains errors. And that happens because we are humans, and humans make errors. There's nothing complicated about that, and we just have to accept that.
It's also the reason why we have to keep sending people up to the heavens.
Someone's gotta press the reset button.
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| "Main_blogentry_230104_2" last changed on 23-Jan-2004 17:02:16 EET by JanneJalkanen. |
Comments
I'm not quite sure if you agree with me or not. Yes, testing is extremely important. Yes, bad software sucks. Yes, it is impossible to produce flawless software.Good rant though :)
--Kolibri, 23-Jan-2004
Um? I had an opinion there somewhere? I wasn't thinking about agreeing or disagreeing - it was just something that popped in my head :-).
And yeah, I agree with those sentiments above :-)
--JanneJalkanen, 23-Jan-2004