Need for Engineering

Historically, professional engineering has been established in response to threats to public safety. Although we take the safety of modern bridges for granted, in the 1860s American bridges were failing at the rate of 25 or more per year.[1] Bridge failures and the loss of life they caused precipitated creation of a stricter engineering approach to bridge design and construction. In Canada, engineering folklore holds that the collapse of the Quebec City bridge in 1907 catalyzed establishment of higher standards in all branches of Canadian engineering, which is symbolized today in the iron ring ceremony.[2] (I'll describe that ceremony in more detail in Chapter 19.) Engineers in Texas were licensed only after a boiler explosion in an elementary school killed more than 300 children in 1937.[3] The part that caused the explosion in 1937 has been replaced today by software.

Engineering differs from other professions in that doctors, dentists, public accountants, and lawyers generally provide their services to specific individuals or, in some cases, to specific corporations. Engineers tend to design things rather than provide services to individuals. Their responsibility is more often to society than to specific people. In this sense, software developers are more like engineers than they are like other kinds of professionals.

Software hasn't yet had its Quebec City bridge or its Texas elementary school boiler. But the potential is real. As any reader of the Forum on Risks to the Public in the Use of Computers and Related Systems[4] knows, software has already been responsible for many multi-million dollar losses, ranging from the ridiculous to the deadly. Tsutomu Shimomura parked on February 29, 1992, at a San Diego airport parking lot. When he returned six days later, his parking bill was $3,771. The parking software didn't recognize February 29 as a valid date.[5] In January 1990, approximately five million telephone calls were blocked over a nine-hour period because of a software error. The first space shuttle launch was delayed for two days because of a subtle programming error. The Mariner I space probe to Venus was lost because of an error in transcribing a guidance equation into software. In London, a computer dispatch system for ambulances was placed into operation before it was ready, collapsed completely, and caused delays as long as 11 hours. As many as 20 deaths were attributed to the new ambulance dispatch system. Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down by the USS Vincennes's Aegis system in 1988, killing 290 people. The error was initially attributed to operator error, but later some experts attributed the incident to the poor design of Aegis's user interface.



Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 164

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