Application Development: Skype, NYSE Error Top List of 13 Big Programming Failures of 2010

As in most any year in the modern age, 2010 saw its share of problems due to programming errors, bugs and other shortcomings. A timing error with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) systems, a Skype crash, problems with Chase online banking, faulty automobile systems at Toyota and privacy breaches were among the year's big-name software problems that might have been avoided at the programming level. For instance, the Skype outage, which affected a large number of Skype's 560 million users, resulted from a bug in the Windows version of the software. In a blog post, Lars Rabbe, CIO at Skype, said the company needed to enhance its capability for testing for and detecting bugs. "While our Windows v5 software release was subject to extensive internal testing and months of Beta testing with hundreds of thousands of users, we will be reviewing our testing processes to determine better ways of detecting and avoiding bugs which could affect the system," Rabbe said in his post. Software application defects are inevitable, but developers have a better chance of catching them if they use enhanced debugging and code analysis platforms and employ Agile methods. In addition, companies such as Replay Solutions, Coverity, Corensic and others offer software to help developers detect and resolve programming issues during the development lifecycle.