The Therac-25 Radiation Overdoses

How Race condition in concurrent programming cost Lives Lost

Financial/Human Cost Lives Lost
Root Cause Race condition in concurrent programming

What Happened?

The The Therac-25 Radiation Overdoses is one of the most infamous examples of a software failure in history. Costing approximately Lives Lost, this incident serves as a grim reminder of why rigorous QA testing is non-negotiable.

The root cause was traced back to Race condition in concurrent programming, a flaw that managed to slip past the development and testing phases into production.

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The Missing Test Cases

What test cases would have caught this bug before it was deployed? Here are the critical scenarios that were missing:

  • Edge Case Validation: The system failed to handle extreme edge cases for race condition in concurrent programming. A comprehensive boundary value analysis was required.
  • Negative Testing: Handling of unexpected, malformed, or malicious input strings.
  • Integration Testing: The interaction between the legacy systems and the newly deployed module was not mocked or tested in a staging environment mirroring production.

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