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A report was released this month about what happened last December at the main London Airports.
At 14:55 on 12th December 2014 all scheduled flights were grounded at London Airports and at 1500 all departures were stopped from European airports that were planned to route through the affected UK airspace.
The reason for the failure was an error in the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) system which shut down the air-traffic control centre at Swanwick. The error was caused by a 20 year old bug. The report into the incident found that a bug in the System Flight Server was at the root of the fault – and that the bug had been in the software since the 1990s.
One of the most interesting aspects to come out of the report was the report’s praise for the engineers and testers who found the bug,
“identifying a software fault in such a large system (the total application exceeds two million lines of code), within only a few hours, is a surprising and impressive achievement”
It’s hard to imagine the pressure they were under to find that bug. All those planes sitting on the tarmac in the run-up to Christmas.
Has that ever happened to you where a critical bug arose and caused critical errors and you had to find it ASAP?
Or would that be something would not happen for most software testing roles?
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