Dec 99 Bookshelf
Volume Number: 15
Issue Number: 12
Column Tag: Programmer's Bookshelf
Computer Snafus
by by Paul E. Sevinç, Switzerland
It's Christmas
Nevertheless was I looking forward to tear this month's book to pieces when I first saw
its cover. I thought to have some kind of "tabloid's digest" in my hand, after all. - But I
erred.
Computer What?
Written by Herman McDaniel and published by Chicora Publishing, Computer Snafus:
Crashes, Errors, Failures, Foul-Ups, Goofs, Glitches, and other malfunctions that
cause computers to go awry [McDaniel 1998] is an anthology of computer incidents in
the widest sense.
I hadn't heard the word "snafus" before. For the benefit of those readers who haven't
either, let me cite the book's introduction: "The American military contributed to our
vocabulary the word “snafu” (defined in dictionaries as “situation normal, all
fouled-up”). For the record, the “f” in “snafu” initially did not stand for “fouled”!
14 Questions
The title of each of the book's 14 chapters is a question; "Can Bankers Bank on
Computer Technology?", for instance, or "Do Computers Really Kill People?". The
chapters are five to thirty pages long and contain incidents that sometimes need
several pages and sometimes only need a couple of lines.
A few of the incidents McDaniel reports on didn't really involve a computer, they just
happened to happen around one. Take the last paragraph of the third chapter, for
example: "According to The Times, the branch manager and an assistant had
accidentally locked themselves inside the ATM safe. Ms. Burnett heard the manager,
pleading to be let out. He managed to pass the appropriate keys through the ATM to
Burnett who then opened the door to free the embarrassed couple.
Many incidents weren't caused by faulty software or hardware, but by people
accidentally cutting fiber cables, by heavy storms damaging computer centers, or by
other non-technical reasons. I liked that McDaniel takes the time to tell how engineers
and managers coped with these situations.
Alas, many incidents were caused by faulty software or hardware. Again, McDaniel
doesn't confine himself to reporting on the consequences only. If the cause of the errors
was disclosed, the reader learns it as well.
In some cases, the hardware or the software itself was "the incident". Namely when the
development didn't meet the schedule, cost more than anticipated, or wasn't completed
at all!
Incentive to Developers
Among all readers, Computer Snafus should make us developers think most. Did people
really have to pay with their lives because of a hardware bug? Was it necessary to
spend millions of tax dollars before realizing that a software project was doomed to
fail? - In defense of those engineers who were involved: I'm sure they all worked to
the best of their knowledge and belief. And the developer community in general has
learned form their mistakes. As a matter of fact, most major foul-ups covered in the
book happened before the nineties. (They still happen, though: at the time of this
writing, the Mars Climate Orbiter loss [see [URL]] is the latest example.)
Conclusion
Despite McDaniel's factual writing (which, in my opinion, is a good thing), Computer
Snafus is rather entertaining. Sometimes I wondered whether Dogbert had a finger
(sorry, a paw) in the pie... The only thing I can reproach the book with is that the
layout doesn't make clear where the coverage of one incident stops and the next starts;
not every reader will want to read about every single one of them.
Computer Snafus is not a must-have: if you have to choose between this book and one
about software reliability (or the like), choose the latter. However, I tend to consider
these two to be complementary; Computer Snafus provides the motivation, the textbook
the actual tools and techniques for writing bug-free software. (Hey, I can dream, can't
I?!)
Anyway, let's end this review with an excerpt from the last chapter: "“Computer
Glitch 'Kills' Constitution”, proclaimed a Washington Post headline on Sunday, June
30, 1991. The article, by Douglas Farah, reported that Colombia's new constitution
might not be approved because “...a computer apparently ate the text.”" Merry
Christmas!
References
[McDaniel 1998] MCDANIEL, Herman. - Computer Snafus: Crashes, Errors, Failures,
Foul-Ups, Goofs, Glitches, and other malfunctions that cause computers to go awry,
Chicora Publishing, 1998.
URL
<http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/orbiter/>
______________________________
Paul is an EE student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) who
is currently working on his buzzword-enabled M.S. thesis at the CS department of the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). If you happen to look for a
software engineer, check out his résumé at http://www.stud.ee.ethz.ch/~psevinc/CV/.