The software-development industry

Developing software

Nov 25th 2004
From The Economist print edition

ON SEPTEMBER 14th, the radios in an air-traffic control centre in Palmdale, California shut down, grounding hundreds of flights in southern California and Nevada, and leading to five mid-air encounters between aircraft unable to talk to the ground controllers. Disaster was averted because aircraft managed to communicate with more distant back-up facilities. But why did Palmdale's radios fail? A glitch in the software running the system meant the computers had to be re-booted every 30 days, and somebody forgot to do so. But software running a mission-critical system should not have to be restarted every month. The culprit: poor design.

At least Palmdale's software worked some of the time. The same cannot be said of an $4 billion write-off that America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had to swallow when a multi-year effort to overhaul its computer system failed completely in 1997. And such problems are confined neither to governments nor to America. A £456m ($844m) project for Britain's Child Support Agency came in over a year late, and has failed to deliver payments to more than half of eligible applicants.…