WeAreDevelopers Logo WeAreDevelopers
Sign in
For You LIVE
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.

Pause
Mute Enter Fullscreen
#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 · World Congress 2023

8:25 min

Bizarre software defects discovered in live production environments

François Martin François Martin · World Congress 2025

1:10 min

Applying space exploration lessons to software operations

Robert Barron Robert Barron · World Congress 2026 Europe

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 · World Congress 2025

2:35 min

Embracing error resolution as a programming puzzle

Lea Fragner · LIVE

More from World Congress 2022

What the heck do "declarative" and "reactive" actually mean? thumbnail
30:40
about 4 years ago

What the heck do "declarative" and "reactive" actually mean?

André Kovac

The Design and Evolution of C++ thumbnail
1:01:15
over 4 years ago

The Design and Evolution of C++

Bjarne Stroustrup

But, you're not Facebook thumbnail
31:12
over 4 years ago

But, you're not Facebook

Kristijan Ristovski

Communicate efficiently with Software Architecture Diagrams thumbnail
28:11
over 4 years ago

Communicate efficiently with Software Architecture Diagrams

Simon Lasselsberger

Get Ready for Jakarta EE 10! thumbnail
42:53
over 4 years ago

Get Ready for Jakarta EE 10!

Ivar Grimstad

Keep your code refactorable thumbnail
26:46
over 4 years ago

Keep your code refactorable

Gerrit Stapper

Related videos

82 Bugs I Collected in a Year You Won’t Believe Made It to Production thumbnail
31:54
World Congress 2025 • about 1 year ago

82 Bugs I Collected in a Year You Won’t Believe Made It to Production

François Martin

Answering the Million Dollar Question: Why did I Break Production? thumbnail
29:38
World Congress 2024 • about 2 years ago

Answering the Million Dollar Question: Why did I Break Production?

Luís Ventura

How to ignore bugs (safely) thumbnail
23:03
World Congress 2023 • almost 3 years ago

How to ignore bugs (safely)

Anja Kunkel

Why (most) software projects fail silently... thumbnail
28:17
World Congress 2025 • about 1 year ago

Why (most) software projects fail silently...

Hendrik Lösch

What I learned as a developer from accidents in space thumbnail
18:44
World Congress 2023 • about 3 years ago

What I learned as a developer from accidents in space

Andrey Sitnik

Antipatterns - nemesis of software development thumbnail
39:49
World Congress 2021 • about 5 years ago

Antipatterns - nemesis of software development

Mustafa Toroman

Related articles

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.