Human lives and livelihood will be cost of flaky software

Sep 14 2004

Multiple human deaths may be required to force the adoption of higher standards in computer software development unless the international software engineering sector lifts its game according UTS IT expert Associate Professor John Leaney.

Leaney made the claim in a recent UTSpeaks public lecture entitled Software Engineering - Bondage or Discipline, which attracted more than eighty software developers, researchers and IT students.

Computer software is pervasive throughout the world, dominates our lives and yet remains largely ungoverned or guided by formal standards that would ensure quality and safety.

According to Leaney we depend on computer-based systems as much as any other infrastructure including water, electricity, construction or transport - but society is not demanding the same level of engineering from software systems.

"We accept lesser quality in software systems as a norm," Professor Leaney said. "For example, a civil engineer is held responsible for adhering to well published, harmonised standards. To not adhere to those standards, and for death to result, will see the civil engineer charged with manslaughter."

The most famous example of software causing death was the Therac25 radiation machine for treating cancer, in which software caused a patient to be overdosed without any warning to the operator.

"There is a feeling in the software engineering community that the only way for the profession to be properly recognised is for software to kill more people," Professor Leaney said.

"It is time for the software engineering industry, government and the legal system to come together to address the areas of risk that to date have fortunately not resulted in major tragedy. But we are on borrowed time."

Leaney's lecture explored the history of software engineering to date, the gaps in current standards and cited famous examples where software has gone dangerously wrong and in some cases caused the ultimate loss.