Wall Street and the Mismanagement of Software 267
CowboyRobot writes "Last week, a bug in high-frequency trading software from Knight Capital Group resulted in erroneous trades costing almost a half-billion dollars. So, what went wrong and how can they, or any other software developer, prevent something similar from happening again? In hindsight, it's clear that the developers did not verify the code under enough conditions. But the real issue is how these high-frequency trades work in the first place. Robert Dewar at Dr. Dobb's suggests the financial industry needs to take a page from the avionics rulebook, which has very strict guidelines about what code can be implemented due to the high cost of failure in that field. 'High-frequency automated trading is not avionics flight control, but the aviation industry has demonstrated that safe, reliable real-time software is possible, practical, and necessary. It requires appropriate development technology and processes as well as a culture that thinks in terms of safety (or reliability) first. That is the real lesson to be learned from last week's incident. It doesn't come for free, but it certainly costs less than $440M.'"
Not a problem (Score:2, Funny)
Early-Breaking News: AGILITY! (Score:5, Funny)
Blair K., Certified Master of the Scrum, responded: "Well, that doesn't sound like a very agile process to me! "Certified" and "compliant with a standard" sound pretty waterfallish. Why not just have a 15-minute standup and decide to launch the plane? At last the aerospace industry could deliver aircraft on time and under budget."
Customer wants their plane painted hot pink? We can totes do that, bros! Shouldn't take more than 24 hours to get to Home Depot and get a few cans of spraypaint. Delivered! And if bits of paint peel off at altitude and get sucked into the engine, gluing themselves to the turbine blades until catastrophic failure of an engine, well, we can just patch the paint recipe in the next sprint! Paint that's "hot pink" is part of this sprint. The user story about engines that don't fail is part of the next sprint.
The real problem with aircraft design is that all our little user stories are in a big clunky database. If we printed out the database's contents (by hand!) on little 3x5 index cards, then we'd be using the best practices of both Scrum and Kanban. Our planes would be so damn agile they'd have turning radii measured in inches.
When a senior engineer piped up that an aircraft with a turning radius measured in inches would kill everyone on board due to G-forces measured in the thousands of Gs, and would likely tear itself apart because the centripetal force far exceeds the tensile modulus of steel, titanium, carbon fiber, or anything else available, he was terminated because "switching from traditional tube-construction to blended-wing-body design made of unobtanium" was part of the next epic.
Re:Wny not just tax trades? (Score:5, Funny)
If code like this works better than human judgement does, doesn't that mean we've made rich people obsolete?
Re:Completely wrong (Score:2, Funny)
Unfortunately, they used the software build that included the test trade generator, and those test trades started executing for real.
And no one immediately caught the "real" vs "silly" trades bug because NO ONE CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE!