$2.41 trillion. That’s the estimate of the cost of poor software quality in the US for 2022. $607bn of that was just finding and fixing bugs. Imagine a world where even safety-critical software systems do not fail. By safety critical, I mean the systems that control airplanes and air traffic, 911 calls, and the power grid delivering gas and electricity supplies. All of these have disasters reported where a computer glitch was cited as the problem. Medical machines are controlled by software, from the heart rate monitor on watches, to the robot surgeon in the hospital. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a whole database of recalled medical devices that include software issues as root cause. Some of them are Class I which means there is “a reasonable chance” that the product will cause health problems or death1.
Software engineers are constantly trying to improve how software is created at all stages of the process, not just coding. How can it be right the first time? It is not possible to prove that there are no bugs. But engineers work hard to find them at all stages of creating and testing the software. Once it is released, engineers still have to maintain the code and fix the issues that inevitably show up. Now I’m sure you’ve heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI), ChatGPT, machine learning, and big data. My research involved looking for ways to use those machine learning algorithms to find bugs. I experimented to see if certain models can work together to make one stronger model, something like a voting system for best one. The data I used to feed into the machine to predict where the errors are, was created by NASA and is freely available for the purpose of improving software engineering.
So, if software engineers can use AI to predict and find more of the errors while building and testing software, they won’t have to go back and fix things. That time can be used instead to innovate and create better new products and services. If they can find the problems in software that is already out there before safety-critical systems go down, it will save not only billions of dollars, but save lives.
This post is adapted from my 3MT2 (three-minute thesis) entry November 2023 at East Carolina University.
- https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-safety/medical-device-recalls. Medical device recalls, U.S. Food & Drug Administration accessed 1/14/2025.
- https://threeminutethesis.uq.edu.au/higher-degrees-researchstart-your-3mt-journey-here. “The competition supports their capacity to effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.”
