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Why do software systems fail? To understand this, we must first understand what a software system is. A software system is actually an information system – an interpreter between various hardware systems and peripherals.

Humans have been processing information manually for thousands of years, but with the huge increase in demand and dissemination of knowledge in this era brought about the research and development of software systems which can process information much more faster and much more efficiently. This, unfortunately, resulted in the overdependence on software systems by organizations and government agencies the world over.

Some of these systems are used to safeguard the lives of the masses. Were there systems to fail, there would be devastating and tragic consequences.

Here are some examples of where sotware systems are in heavy use and could be very alarming if they were to fail-the civil aviation industry, hospitals, space exploration facilities, nuclear power stations and information and communications industries.

Contrary to popular belief that software systems are foolproof and perfect, the fact is, according to Parnas,”… software can never be guaranteed to be 100% reliable. Software systems are discrete-state systems that do not have repetitive structures. The mathematical functions that describe the behavior of software systems are not continuos, and traditional engineering mathematics do not help in their verification.”

An example of a software system failure was the Atlas-Agena rocket incident. The 20-million-dollar rocket veered off-course when it was ninety miles up and ground control had to destroy it to prevent its crashing and killing innocent people. And what was the reason for this mishap? It was discovered later that one of the programmers had blundered and left out a hyphen in one of the specification fields of the program! Imagine, that single hyphen cost 20 million dollars! Thankfully, no one was hurt, for no amount of money could replace a life.

There are several reasons behind software systems failure : fundamental flaws in the design of the software; incorrect reuirement specifications (as in the Atlas-Angena rocket incident); economical reasons and pressures which lead developers to skip parts of the program deemed unimportant at the time of development but could result in serious repercussions upon implementation; incorrect analysis based on incorrect assumptions of real-world behavior; not properly tested software implemented in a high-risk environment; poor user-interface that makes operation difficult; incompatibility between software and hardware; inadequate training given to system operators; and over-reliance on the software system.

Although I agree that it is quite impossible to have a 100% reliable software system, I also believe that systems failure could be kept low when systems developers take into deep and careful consideration of all the points I have mentioned earlier and practice utmost diligence when developing software systems.