On this week’s Quotes of the Week: A bug in a Las Vegas slot machine, the dilemma of the software testing budget, a banking- transfer collapse and a software bug affects hospital machines.
The story of a man who found a software bug in a Machine at a Las Vegas Casino
“But the new Game King code had one feature that wasn’t in the brochure—a series of subtle errors in program number G0001640 that evaded laboratory testing and source code review.”
John Kane, a regular Las Vegas gambler and a former virtuoso pianist found a software bug in one of the slot machines games in Las Vegas. When a sequence of buttons were pressed in the right way, the machine doubled the pay-out of winnings. John Kane took advantage. His story is a really fascinating read. Read the full story here.
Software testing and QA budgets going on the wrong items?
“A new study finds that, for the first time, most IT testing and QA dollars…are now being spent on new stuff, such as social, mobile, analytics, cloud and the Internet of Things, and less of it on simply modernizing and maintaining legacy systems and applications.“
The allocation of software testing budgets are being spent on the new technologies while the budgets for maintenance are decreasing according to a new survey. Read more here
Banking Collapse
“The whole economy depends on a reliable payment system. We need to have confidence that the cause has been found and addressed.” – Andrew Tyrie M.P. Chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee
The Bank of England had an issue on Monday with two of its payments transfer systems. Both the Clearing House Automated Payments System (CHAPS) and Real Time Gross Settlement payment system (RTGS) went down from their opening time of 6 AM to 3:30PM (the time the system is usually set to close). The systems handle about £277 billion of transfers a day mainly inter-bank transfers and business to bank transfers. Most of those affected were those purchasing or selling houses. Read more here.
Software Bug Affects Radiation Emitting Device
“The ‘bug’ has been corrected in software upgrades that have been implemented to all of the affected sites in the U.S. The U.S. NRC was notified of the completed status of software upgrades to correct the identified ‘bug’.”
A software bug was found in a life-saving radiation therapy device. The device called the Gamma Knife, had a software bug that could cause the system’s emergency stop button to fail to stop. This was discovered after a patient at a Cleveland hospital had to be physically pulled from the machine. The device resembles a CT scanner and focuses radiation on a patient’s brain tumour while leaving surrounding tissue untouched. Read more about the bug and the machine here.
If you have any suggestions for quotes of the Week, you can contribute through the discussion on TEST Huddle here.
