Computer Reliability - Ethics for the Information Age - page 401

quite a few bugs. All of the known bugs appear to be minor, but some of the planned
tests have not yet been performed.
Because of the fierce competition in the medical software industry, it is critical that
this company be the first to market. It appears a well-established company will release a
similar product in a few weeks. If its product appears first, Medick will probably go out
of business.
Divide the class into five groups representing the software engineers programming
the device, the sales force that has been promoting the device, the managers of Medick,
the venture capitalists who bankrolled Medick, and the nurses at a hospital purchasing
the device. Discuss the best course of action for Medick.

Further Reading and Viewing

Walt Bogdanich. “Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm.” New York Times ,
January 23, 2010.
Walt Bogdanich. “As Technology Surges, Radiation Safeguards Lag.” New York Times , January
26, 2010. www.nytimes.com.
Rob Holdorp. “What 3 Million Lines of Code Means to a Piece of Luggage.” IBM. 2:33. www
.ibm.com/innovation/us/leadership/luggage/.
Poul-Henning Kamp. “The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake: Did Ken, Dennis, and Brian
Choose Wrong with NUL-terminated Text Strings?” ACM Queue , July 25, 2011. queue
.acm.org.
Nancy Leveson and Clark Turner. “An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents.” Computer ,
pp. 18-41, July 1993.

References

[1] Jennifer DiSabatino. “Unregulated Databases Hold Personal Data.” Computerworld

36(4), January 21, 2002.

[2] Peter G. Neumann. “More on False Arrests.” Risks Digest 1(5), September 4, 1985.

[3] Rodney Hoffman. “NCIC Information Leads to Repeat False Arrest Suit.” Risks Digest

8(71), May 17, 1989.

[4] Ted Bridis. “US Lifts FBI Criminal Database Checks.” Associated Press , March 25, 2003.

[5] Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Privacy Act of 1974; Imple-

mentation.” Federal Register 68(56), March 24, 2003.

[6] “Computer Glitch Is to Blame for Faulty Bills, Qwest Says.” Deseret News ( Salt Lake

City, Utah ) , July 24, 2001.

[7] “USDA Changes Livestock Price-Reporting Guidelines.” Amarillo ( Te x a s ) Globe-News ,

July 24, 2001.

[8] “Software Error Returns Patent Office Mail.” New York Times , August 9, 1996.

[9] “Spelling and Grammar Checkers Add Errors.” Wired News , March 18, 2003.

[10] D. F. Galletta, A. Durcikova, A. Everard, and B. Jones. “Does Spell-Checking Software

Need a Warning Label?” Communications of the ACM , pp. 82-86, July 2005.