Re: "249 days is a long-time to have something on continuous test. "
"249 days is a long-time to have something on continuous test. "
Sure is, Which is why people who know safety critical software, and producing guidelines related thereto, understand that normal operational testing is only one part of a multi-prong strategy for risk and defect reduction.
One such aspect was code inspection by engineers with a clue (sometimes, expensive people with a clue, frequently engineers who are nowadays unpopular with Management, because they spot things that need fixing, and modern Management frequently like to ship stuff earlier rather than ship less-defective stuff).
Another aspect was automated in-target testing along "test what you ship, ship what you test" lines, but with mechanisms that allow variables to be set before entry to a piece of code, and results checked on exit. So you could very quickly check what happened when you add 1 to 32767 (to quote a very simple example). No need to wait 249 days to see your overflow.
We don't yet know *exactly* what happened. I'll be interested to see how it could have been avoided. But I'll be astounded if it genuinely only shows up after 249 days and couldn't have been foreseen and therefore prevented at design/code/test time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
