Toyota's Killer Firmware

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:26AM from the skynet-draws-first-blood dept.

New submitter Smerta writes "On Thursday, a jury verdict found Toyota's ECU firmware defective, holding it responsible for a crash in which a passenger was killed and the driver injured. What's significant about this is that it's the first time a jury heard about software defects uncovered by a plaintiff's expert witnesses. A summary of the defects discussed at trial is interesting reading, as well the transcript of court testimony. 'Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.' Anyone wonder what the impact will be on self-driving cars?"

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The Toyota Way by gandhi_2 · 2013-10-29 08:34 · Score: -1, Troll

Idea:
The ideals of The Toyota Way, as embodied in the corporate religion of Lean, may have contributed to overlooking some aspects of software engineering best practices.
Discuss.

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THL phish sticks
1. Re:The Toyota Way by gandhi_2 · 2013-10-29 08:54 · Score: -1, Troll
  
  I'm merely getting the ball rolling here.
  But The Motorola Way, as embodied by the engineer's corporate religion of Six Sigma, would not have trucked with such nonsense. Just saying, brah.
  Discuss.
  Oh, and I'm sure I've seen it done all wrong. But every time I've seen it, it's been an excuse to never order parts until it's too late because companies are cheap.
  
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  THL phish sticks