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World Congress 2022 • Jun 15, 2022

The Software Bug All Stars - and what we can learn from them

Christian Seifert

A unit conversion error destroyed a Mars orbiter. A leap year calculation bricked the Microsoft Zune. Discover how studying history's biggest bugs helps developers write bulletproof code.

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#1 about 2 min

Financial impacts of software bugs and learning from them

Highlighting the immense financial losses caused by software errors motivates the need to study and prevent common coding mistakes.

#2 about 5 min

Mars Climate Orbiter loss due to unit measurement mismatch

A catastrophic misinterpretation of imperial and metric measurements emphasizes the dangers of un-typed raw data and ignoring engineer warnings.

#3 about 4 min

Using value objects and strong typing for data safety

Wrapping primitives into strongly typed value objects clarifies unit meaning and eliminates silent logical errors across application boundaries.

#4 about 6 min

Preventing severe failures through rigorous QA and organizational safeguards

The fatal Therac-25 race condition illustrates the severe risks of self-certified testing, unhelpful error codes, and developer confirmation bias.

#5 about 6 min

Navigating date handling edge cases with robust standard libraries

Infinite loops caused by leap year edge cases prove that developers should always rely on built-in standard libraries for time computation.

#6 about 4 min

Managing resource accumulation and disk space limits in systems

Endless local data accumulation leading to necessary airplane reboots demonstrates why engineers must aggressively manage finite hardware resources.

#7 about 2 min

Embracing failures and analyzing high-profile software engineering mistakes

Analyzing major industry software defects helps engineering teams confront their own biases and proactively improve internal safety processes.

#8 about 2 min

Debugging application slowdowns caused by system entropy pool exhaustion

A blocking token generator case study reveals how exhausting a system entropy pool can unexpectedly paralyze application request performance.

Matching moments

3:08 min

Preventing catastrophic failures in high-stakes software

Lars Hupel · WWC 2023

8:25 min

Bizarre software defects discovered in live production environments

François Martin François Martin · WWC 2025

1:10 min

Applying space exploration lessons to software operations

Robert Barron Robert Barron · WWC Europe 2026

4:40 min

Mitigating developer mistakes without a culture of blame

Eleanor Rumsey · LIVE

2:11 min

Analyzing the cost of fixing structural software defects

David Tielke David Tielke · WWC 2025

2:35 min

Embracing error resolution as a programming puzzle

Lea Fragner · LIVE

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