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Guest View: Eight Harsh Truths About Embedded Software Risks

By Bill Weinberg

July 1, 2005 — (Page 1 of 2)
All useful real-world software is buggy, poorly specified, insecure and supported by organizations with uncertain prospects for longevity. Purchasers of software, particularly technically savvy purchasers, do have many avenues of reducing risk, but effective mitigation strategies require a commitment to seeing through marketing fluff, evading FUD, and facing up to actual harsh limitations and costs.

The following eight statements serve to illustrate the challenges faced by companies trying to deliver next-generation intelligent devices:

1. No bug-free software. Nobody knows how to develop large-scale programs that are free of bugs. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either fabricating or in possession of an astounding scientific advance. One common method for producing software that can be claimed to be provably correct is to reduce functionality to a unusable minimum. This trick just moves the problem to a later phase of development.

2. No guarantees of quality. None of the various methods proposed for and promoted as making software more reliable or secure, or for proving that software is reliable or secure, have been scientifically validated.

There is disagreement even on how to test whether such methods work. Comprehensive testing, and source code and configuration management are good things, but they are neither perfect nor assured by any credentials right now. It is just as easy to find alarmingly bad software with a given safety or security stamp as it is to find quite good software without any imprimatur.

3. The software business is dynamic. The software industry is, in a word, dynamic. Big companies enthusiastically (periodically) embrace massive reorganizations and changes in direction without warning. This dynamism startles technology consumers who assume, against all evidence, that “big” implies “stable.” Software purchasers should try to make sure that the vendor has a profitable business selling the solution. Lack of profits always leads to changes in pricing and terms or abandonment of the product line.

4. Standard solutions often aren’t. Marketing departments cannot create engineering solutions. Widespread belief that some software is a “standard solution” does not mean it works well or is a suitable solution for a given problem. The marketplace is littered with the remains of companies that have wasted huge sums of money with those so-called standard solutions. Management in technology companies must start demanding that highly paid technically expert staff actually evaluate software for suitability instead of looking for ways to share blame.

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