1: Crisis!

Important dates

Resources

• Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month essay
• Software Engineering Radio, Episode 100: Software in Space, with H.-J. Popp: http://www.se-radio.net/
• Glass, prologue of Software Runaways
• Articles that I tagged ‘disaster’
• ACM Digital Library

Notes

• The video of the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure — it’s kind of amazing this was caught on film. Not a lot of people were running around with camera phones in 1940.

Assignment

Conduct library and Internet research to find 2 news and/or trade magazine articles about a serious software disaster. I will give you leads on some famous ones, as starting points. By the deadline, post a description (roughly 1 page) about what went wrong, and any lessons learned, citing the original article(s). Also, try to post at least two follow-ups to your classmates’ findings. The follow-up discussion should tie to some principle from the readings/resources.

We’ll try to have this discussion on Coursekit, a brand new course management system. You’ll get the registration code in class.

For library research, I strongly suggest the ACM Digital Library. You can freely download full-text articles while on campus, or use the proxy link and your library bar-code for off-campus access.