Software Failure

By Raul Bernardino

Introduction:

Nowadays, we can easily find software applications in everywhere such as on the internet, market, from reseller agents, from developers, and etc. Those software applications are implementing in the various industries, in the companies, in the institutions, in the government, and in the organizations. The aim of the software is to automate manual functions such as increasing the reliabilities and accuracies, cost saving for the labor, paperless, and green environment, and etc. Although, these software applications are helping the human being in order to have a quick and efficient results and to have reliable and accuracy calculations or measurements. It is also including to store and to retrieve information for the decision making processes or for another purposes; this software has also had a limitation in which might caused the system failure or system halt during execution of the tasks or it services, for instance virgin blue system error. Even, it might cause the life of the human being such as therac-25. 

According to the Hall and Fernandez-Ramil, “the software applications have not returned the benefit to the economy, if anything to expend on larger software and hardware will lead to decreasing national productivities,” Hall, P. A.V. & Fernandez-Ramil, J. (2007, p.16).

Let’s start with two examples of the virgin blue airline that using the IT services. First, the virgin blue system was sending an error email of upgrading customer’s membership rewards from “velocity member to gold member” which was well known as “Friday the 13^th strikes”. The velocity customers were getting emails as it shows in below picture:

This caused the velocity website crashed, lot of customers tried to visit the site to ensure the truth. An hour later sent an apology email to the velocity customers as it shows in below picture:

Second, the virgin blue IT system failure caused around fifty thousand passengers can’t board including canceling hundreds of the virgin blue flights in Australia. The Navitaire was contracted with virgin blue to give IT service. In the service agreement that was established is very clear stated that in any critical mission, the remedies have to be in the period of the short time in the outages. The hardware faulty from ‘Navitaire’ had made an additional cost to the virgin blue. The virgin blue has to pay passengers accommodations that were not able to broad at that time.

With two examples above, the first IT system error whereas incidentally upgrade the not entitled velocity members to rewards the Gold member, was a confusing information. The second issue of hardware failure had cost extra to the virgin blue.

On the therac-25 issue was identified as bugs that upgraded from therac-20 as in the following text box:

Possible Thearac-25 Failures:

• There were no proper assessment and testing of the new created machine
• Error detection massage are not well design
• Not proper action after first error detected
• The safety glitch is not proper installed
• There were not have a proper communication among hospital who using the machine with government and manufactory 

 In conclusion: Any software development, has to be in-line with the business needs, designed in the scope of requirements, and tested the application for several time of period before going to be real in production, and including to establish the back system in which to anticipate the failures.

References:

Grubb, B. (13 November 2009), Virgin Blue "error" upgrades passengers to gold

status, [Online].  Available from:  http://www.itnews.com.au/News/160494,virgin-blue-error-upgrades-passengers-to-gold-status.aspx  (Accessed: 7 October 2011).

Australia Association Press, (27 September 2010), Australian airline grounded by

IT failure, [Online].  Available from: 

http://www.information-age.com/channels/it-services/news/1286558/australian-airline-grounded-by-it-failure.thtml

 (Accessed: 7 October 201).

An Investigation of the Therac-25 Incident, [Online]. Available from:

http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html (Accessed: 7 October  2011)

Case Analysis Module: Therac-25, [Online]. Available from:

          http://cnx.org/content/m13765/latest/ (Accessed: 7 October 2011)

Hall, P. A.V. & Fernandez-Ramil, J. (2007) Managing the Software Enterprise:

Software Engineering and Information Systems in Context. London: Thomson Learning.