Chapter 1. Probably Approximately Correct Software
If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, you have participated in one of the safest forms of travel in the world. The odds of being killed in an airplane are 1 in 29.4 million, meaning that you could decide to become an airline pilot, and throughout a 40-year career, never once be in a crash. Those odds are staggering considering just how complex airplanes really are. But it wasn’t always that way.
The year 2014 was bad for aviation; there were 824 aviation-related deaths, including the Malaysia Air plane that went missing. In 1929 there were 257 casualties. This makes it seem like we’ve become worse at aviation until you realize that in the US alone there are over 10 million flights per year, whereas in 1929 there were substantially fewer—about 50,000 to 100,000. This means that the overall probability of being killed in a plane wreck from 1929 to 2014 has plummeted from 0.25% to 0.00824%.
Plane travel changed over the years and so has software development. While in 1929 software development as we know it didn’t exist, over the course of 85 years we have built and failed many software projects.
Recent examples include software projects like the launch of healthcare.gov, which was a fiscal disaster, costing around $634 million dollars. Even worse are software projects that have other disastrous bugs. In 2013 NASDAQ shut down due to a software glitch and was fined $10 million USD. The year 2014 saw the Heartbleed bug infection, which ...
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