When a Single Missing Line Caused a $440 Million Crash: The Ariane 5 Disaster

The nightmare of Software Developers is not the feature development or adding features to the existing project. It’s rather a software bug which appears to be present all of a sudden without any clue to anyone.

Most of us would have come across that kind of issues and surprisingly the fix for those appeared exactly small. Just modify a piece of line of code or delete or change the code flow.

How to fix those kind of issues? It’s not one of the items like 21 ways to solve… or 15 steps to identify kind of methodological ways. Then? To be honest, We’ve to accept the reality and understand that we can’t predict or forecast that kind of issues irrespective of large array of static analysis tools, leak detectors etc. We can use Charlie Munger inversion logic like instead of fixing those bugs we can ask like what are the ways we can be 99% free of those bugs!!!

Let’s see that kind of issue happened in the history sometime ago.

At the centre of the Ariane 5 disaster was a seemingly harmless software bug: a data conversion error. The rocket’s Inertial Reference System (SRI) software attempted to convert a 64-bit floating-point value which represented horizontal velocity into a 16-bit signed integer. However, the value was too large to fit within…