[Shop-talk] Toyota Recall

[Mullen, Tim (IS)]

> Or maybe they just don't understand the nature of embedded software
> bugs.  Real-time code is fraught with hazards along the lines of
> "what if this event happens between those two lines of code" and
> we are long since past the point where it can be exhaustively
> tested in any reasonable length of time.

I once had some real-time software that I wrote that passed all testing
and was in production for nearly a year before it started crashing.

It took me two months to find the problem (mostly to be able to
reproduce the "random" failure.  It all involved a subtle timing issue
between two events.  Two lines of code fixed the problem and it worked
flawlessly for years after that.  But in my case, the worst that
happened was a hung database..

Tim Mullen