Speak, Memory! Analyzing Historical Accidents to Sensitize Software Testing Novices

Natalia Silvis-Cividjian*, Fritz Hager

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Accidents tend to be traumatic events that one would rather forget than remember. Software testing novices at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, on the contrary, rewind the past and learn how to safeguard the future.In this paper we will present FAIL, a rather unconventional assignment that methodically investigate 13 historical software-related accidents, varying from the Ariane-5 rocket explosion to the Knight Capital trading glitch. Innovative is that software testing students use STAMP, a modern systems-theory-based accident causality model and have the possibility to interview a witness of the famous Therac-25 radiation overexposures.A recent deployment to 96 CS graduates received positive evaluations. We learned that even a lightweight, yet systematic investigation of failures (1) motivates students, by sensitizing them to the consequences of suboptimal testing, and (2) reveals key soft-skills testers need to prevent disasters, such as defensive pessimism and a strong backbone. Other, more subtle benefits of the proposed approach include (3) really-happened, instead of artificial case-studies that increase a teacher's credibility, and (4) extraordinary test scenarios students will always remember.These results invite software engineering educators to include safety assessment elements in their curricula, and call on witnesses of software-related accidents to break the silence and share memories. Future work includes crafting a repository of heritage artifacts (narratives, videos, witness testimonies and physical replicas) to reproduce historical software-related accidents, and make it available to interested educators. Our hope is that motivated professionals will emerge, better prepared to engineer the safe software-intensive systems we all can rely on.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)
Subtitle of host publication[Proceedings]
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages70-81
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9798350322590
ISBN (Print)9798350322606
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training, ICSE-SEET 2023 - Melbourne, Australia
Duration: 14 May 202320 May 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training, ICSE-SEET 2023
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityMelbourne
Period14/05/2320/05/23

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Hans van Vliet, for his suggestion to start in 2007 a software testing course at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam; Nancy Leveson (MIT), who understood like no other the root-causes of Therac-25 accidents, for her inexhaustible energy and dedication ever after, to widely promote systems-thinking for a safer world; Marcel van Herk, Jake van Dyk, Mike Speiser, enthusiastic medical physicists who helped us to connect and eventually set this wonderful project; our reliable and ingenuous VU Software Testing teaching team, with Joshua Kenyon, Jasper Veltman, Glenn Visser, Koen Kahlmann and Erik Link, for their year-by-year help in smoothly running the course; all CS students enrolled in the VU Software Testing course in 2020/2021 and 2021/2022, for their endurance and serious response in our unconventional educational initiatives. The VU-BugZoo project was funded by the NRO, The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research, as part of a Comenius Teaching Fellow grant.

Funding Information:
The VU-BugZoo project was funded by the NRO, The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research, as part of a Comenius Teaching Fellow grant.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.

Funding

The authors would like to thank Hans van Vliet, for his suggestion to start in 2007 a software testing course at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam; Nancy Leveson (MIT), who understood like no other the root-causes of Therac-25 accidents, for her inexhaustible energy and dedication ever after, to widely promote systems-thinking for a safer world; Marcel van Herk, Jake van Dyk, Mike Speiser, enthusiastic medical physicists who helped us to connect and eventually set this wonderful project; our reliable and ingenuous VU Software Testing teaching team, with Joshua Kenyon, Jasper Veltman, Glenn Visser, Koen Kahlmann and Erik Link, for their year-by-year help in smoothly running the course; all CS students enrolled in the VU Software Testing course in 2020/2021 and 2021/2022, for their endurance and serious response in our unconventional educational initiatives. The VU-BugZoo project was funded by the NRO, The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research, as part of a Comenius Teaching Fellow grant. The VU-BugZoo project was funded by the NRO, The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research, as part of a Comenius Teaching Fellow grant.

Keywords

  • accident investigations
  • assignments
  • history of computing
  • safety science
  • soft skills
  • software testing education
  • STAMP
  • Therac-25
  • witness accounts

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