catastrophic disasters due to software system failures

views:

128

answers:

+1 Q:

catastrophic disasters due to software system failures

I know this is not a programming problem, but this problem is related to computer systems I am posting this question.

Can somebody tell me a good place to find out information related to catastrophic disasters due to software system failures? For example incidents like Therac-25.

The risk digest is a good place, but information it provides for each case is not enough for my requirement.

Thanks

+1 A:

There are a couple of other places that spring to mind if the Risks archive is not sufficient.

One is Robert Glass's book 'Software Runaways: Catastrophic Disasters due to Software System Failures'.

The other is P G Neumann's book based on the Risks archive, 'Computer-Related Risks', which is now a bit dated (1994; wow, time flies!).

Glass also has a book 'ComputingFailure.com' that is apposite. You might consider 'Death March' and 'Decline and Fall of the American Programmer' (Yourdon) as related too.

Jonathan Leffler 2010-02-02 04:54:59

@Jonathan. Sorry for this bit of "meta" but what are these URLs to Amazon? (rads.stackoverflow.com/...) ? Is this the recommended way to link to this vendor [from SO] ?

mjv 2010-02-02 05:00:51

@mjv: I wrote the URLs as Amazon; SO rewrites them so they get the appropriate kick-back from Amazon as people click through. This was discussed in the SO blog a few months ago, IIRC (and probably in extenso in Meta-SO).

Jonathan Leffler 2010-02-02 05:05:36

Thank you for the info, Jonathan. Makes sense [that a) SO would like kick-back and b) that this would be easy transparent for SO contributors].

mjv 2010-02-02 05:11:35

@mjv: see http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising-experiment/

Jonathan Leffler 2010-02-02 05:21:22

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

catastrophic disasters due to software system failures

related questions