Software Quality

Preface

The following software “glitches” seem very real:

• Thousands of the US students in numerous cities around the United States had just taken their examination. Tired and excited, they pressed the submit button only to find that their answers could not be uploaded with the software (purchased specifically for this purpose). As expected, the anger, utter frustration, and disappointment of the students turned into a flood of lawsuits against the exam software company.
• More than 24 inmates from a US jail were wrongly released, among them were prisoners jailed for violent crimes. The faulty release was caused by the erroneous release of documents that were produced by a new software system recently implemented to manage the institute's records. According to the spokesman of the county jail, the mistake was due to glitches in the software, which caused the misprocessing of a number of input documents. The early detection of the software failure prevented a much higher number of faulty inmate releases.
• A software failure in an income tax collection system caused millions of citizens to use the wrong tax code in the income tax site program. This mistake caused many people to pay less than required, and many to pay more than required. Unfortunately, it took a whole year to identify the failure. Naturally, the inevitable happened, and the income tax department now faces innumerable filings for tax returns. Only when these return procedures have concluded, will the income tax department ...