Minnstf Voting Meeting this Saturday - Dream Park

 The most important Minnstf meeting of the year is about to happen! At least according to the Minnstf Bylaws, which require just one official meeting a year for the purpose of electing the Board of Directors. You are eligible to vote if you have attended a total of at least 7 Minnstf or Minicon meetings during the year. If you are eligible you should have received a ballot by now. If you have not, please contact Laura Krentz, our Membership Secretary.

 

Whether you are a voting member or not, the voting meeting is usually a lively meeting, so please come! Ballots are due by 4:30 pm, but can be dropped off in the box on our porch at any time before the meeting. 

 

This year the meeting date falls between Pi Day and St. Patrick's Day, so we are officially encouraging people to bring pie and whatever you think of as St Paddy's Day food. We are cooking corned beef and cabbage, and will probably provide at least a little pie. 

 

Location:  Dream Park:  40002 Pillsbury Ave S, Minneapolis

Parking:    Odd side of Pillsbury or 40th Street are both fair game

Time:        Officially starts at 2 pm, most people show up a little later. 

                 But remember, ballots are due by 4:30

 

Your Hosts:  Richard Tatge and Sharon Kahn

Worst software bug in the history of the world?

 I just read the latest news about the 737-Max jet that crashed in Ethiopia. Just like that other one in Indonesia, the damn thing started porpoising up and down minutes after takeoff while accelerating insanely, then nose dived into the ground and killed all aboard. This is not a thing that jumbo jets just randomly do when they get hit by a bad gust of wind. And the chances of two of the same model of plane exhibiting the same possessed-by-the-devil behavior in 5 months purely by chance is infinitesimal. Something in the millions of lines of code controlling those planes went down a horribly wrong path. And of course most of the time it doesn't do that, but that wrong path is still in there somewhere and it will keep getting executed periodically until someone tracks it down. It's one of those incredibly frustrating unreproducible bugs that are the bane of the software tester's existence. 

But this bug didn't just corrupt a file, or open up a security hole in a data center, or even sabotage a medical device and accidentally kill a handful of patients. This one crashes jumbo jets nose-first into the ground with screaming pilots yanking futilely at the controls. This is why aerospace test cycles are 18 months to 4 years in length - because 99.9% zero defects isn't enough. If there is a more damaging, terrifying place for a tiny little critical software defect to work its wiles, I can't think what it might be. My heart goes out to not only the families of the dead, but to the hundreds of programmers and testers that worked on that system who are lying awake wondering if it was their fault. 

And fuck you, Boeing. Yeah, I know you didn't do it on purpose but it's your fucking bug and you need to own it. None of this shit about how you had to *sigh* ground all those totally perfectly 100% safe planes "out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public." The problem is not with the overly hysterical flying public, guys.

Yes, you guessed it, I was a software tester. Not in aerospace or medical devices, just in networking where lives do not usually hang on a single bug. But I did spend a whole weekend at a software conference in Oregon that was almost entirely devoted to the daunting task of figuring out how to test the humongous flying computer network that was the Boeing 777, then under development. It made an impression on me. As far as I know, not one of those jets ever went down due to a bug like this, so I guess they figured it out.