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Food is NOT like software. If you make software, and your customers lose data, time, or money because you sold them buggy software due to lack of testing, you'
by cs702 10y ago
Food is NOT like software.
If you make software, and your customers lose data, time, or money because you sold them buggy software due to lack of testing, you'll probably be OK. You can iterate quickly and break things regularly as you improve the product, and your customers will put up with it.
But if you make food, and your customers get poisoned because you sold them poison due to lack of testing, you're going to get in trouble. Federal and state government agencies will want to have a serious chat with you and possibly will shut you down. You cannot iterate quickly and break things regularly to improve a food product; you cannot experiment with the health of your customers.
If poisoning from Soylent bars was due to lack of careful testing prior to releasing the bars to market, shame on the company.
- paulddraper 10y agoMaybe the software you work with. Not all software is uber-for-toothbrushes.com. Other software could kill people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- uabstraction 10y agoAs a machinist who occasionally write programs in G-Code from scratch and adjusts them almost daily I can say even if it doesn't kill anyone, it might send 25 pounds of brass spinning at 750 RPM flying across the shop. People take writing harmless software for granted, but there are many fields where a software failure can cause a serious emergency. There are embedded systems lurking in a huge variety of machines which operate with deadly forces... from aircraft to power plants to industrial processes to the car you drive to work.
- TheCapn 10y agoI like sharing this image with friends when talking about how safety and responsibility matter in software: http://i.imgur.com/SFHjzNg.png http://i.imgur.com/SFHjzNg.png - A snippet from the help files for a PLC coding program. If people want to adopt calling themselves Software Engineers I say they need to uphold Engineering principles and that usually involves a lot more responsibility than I see in software communities.
- Cephlin 10y agoAnother example would be writing software for medical trials that then allocates the wrong active dosages can be very harmful. There are many cases as you mentioned.