Slashdot Mirror
Blackout Cause: Buggy Code
blanca writes "The big northeast blackout from last summer was caused in part by a software bug in an energy managment system sold by General Electic, according to a story on SecurityFocus. The bug meant that a computerized alarm that should have been triggered never went off, hindering FirstEnergy's response to the train of events that lead to the cascading blackout. Investigators found the bug in a intensive code audit following the outage, and a patch is now available."
... when you outsource to the lowest bidder?
I've said enough.
The term 'Software Engineering' is bantered about in the software industry. I think little that you could call engineering happens. Software is developed. It doesn't meet the strict standards of testing and reliability of physical products.
I am a software developer not an engineer, as are most people in the field. Software won't become an engineering science until companies are willing to pay for that process. Given the current trend towards cost cutting I don't see that happening anytime soon.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Now if in fact this was buggy code, and if Software Engineers are in fact part of the engineering profession, then a professional body should be taking the engineer(s) to task. This would be the same thing that would take place in the event that a civil engineer signed off on faulty building plans. But smart money says no software "engineer" will get nailed.
A look at the software industry will show this to be the norm. And that is why there is such a problem with having people claiming the title of "software engineer". "Engineer" doesn't just mean having the technical savvy, it also means having a responsibility to the public for the use of that knowledge and being beholden to a professional body charged with ensuring you are held accountable.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Open source almost certainly would have not prevented the bug. The bug might have been found faster after it happened though, because curious (or under pressure from their boss) engineers engineers in every facility affected would spend at least some time trying to figure out what went wrong.
Having the source is great, and you would be surprised at the number of companies who license the source for what they use. Risk management is important. Free isn't everything, you can get many of the same things by paying
Blaming the black out on a software bug is a damn cop-out. The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid that can barely keep up with the current demand. Any major failure in the system can cause a cascading failure of the entire section of the grid. That is a horrible design. A software bug may have been the trigger but it is by no means the true cause.
The grid in the North East US is supplied by horribly inefficient and antiquated power lines that were struggling to keep up thirty years ago. That they are still in use today is an outright crime. There's also the issue of the operators of the lines generators trying to save a few bucks by cutting maintenance on equipment and facilities and cutting supervising staffs down to skeleton crews. It is much easier to fit "software bug" into a sound bite so the news media will stick with that. Unfortunately the real cause of the black out is not ever going to be patched and another blackout is as inevitable as this last one was. I hope next time a few more people will have invested in backup generators or some alternate form of power to keep from losing their business during a blackout.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons to me :)
Given my personal experience with this certain Fortune 5 company and software development as a whole, I am not surprised.
The bottom line is that there is soooo much software developed here by non-computer programmers. There are many great Engineers (Mechanical, Aerospace, etc.) here, yet very few can write good code. Many of them are asked to write code nonetheless and thanks to the travesty that is Visual Basic and other Rapid Application Development tools the code that is produced is extremely un-maintainable.
Then you have the matter of people moving jobs every 2 years and the poor bastard who has to maintain someone else's code gets lost inside of it.
Consider me very frustrated at the whole process.
In all fairness...
The Mars Rover's software crashed in just a few days.
Virtually all software should be designed and tested better than it is.
However, I'm perplexed at why the Mars Rover failure and resurrection is considered a miracle of human inginuity, rather than an indictment of crummy testing.
I'll not excuse the power grid software either; but it seems to work more reliably than the software on the Rover.
According to the SecurtyFocus article, the operators had no way of knowing, because the data wasn't "live." This is a common problem with SCADA systems--the systems will display the "last known-good value" if something goes offline. However, the system should also visibly identify the data as "out of service" or "offline," and this didn't seem to happen. That could be an issue at the server, or it could be something blamed on the people commissioning the XA/21 system (assuming the display is configurable enough to allow you to program it at this level).
Even so, there should have been sufficient watchdog messages between the client, the server, and the field hardware for the XA/21 to broadcast a general alarm along the lines of "I can't talk to the stinking field, so we're all flying blind here, you morons!" This is exactly the same as software in my industry (HVAC fire/security systems for large buildings), where if you lose communication to a subsystem or the field, you have to raise alarms all over the place.
The real question is how you could lose such comm and the operators had no visible indication that they were relying on old data. This sounds like a missed requirement, if not insufficient testing.
Tim