ENGR101-A-Team

As we saw in the last post, Emmett makes the difficult decision to approve the software, despite his knowledge of a critical bug. Let's explore what went wrong that put him in that decision, and what choices he had. Let's start when BiffCo began bidding on the FAA contract. The company knowingly underbid the project because of fierce competition, which led to the shortage of manpower and deadline crunch that eventually caused Emmett's conundrum. Was it morally justified to underbid, and then understaff the contract? The employees were concerned about their job security, due to the company's uncertain future. Does that justify the behavior, even when you know it might cause future dilemmas and compromise safety? Emmett later discovers the bug that could lead to a devastating crash. He brings it up to his boss, Martin, only to be told that they cannot possibly miss the deadline, or it would mean disaster for the entire aerospace division of BiffCo. Thousands of peopl...

In this scenario, aerospace software engineer Emmett Brown has to decide whether to sign off on sending a new air traffic control system to their client, the FAA. The dilemma that Emmett faces is that the project's deadline has come up before his team will be able to fix a bug that he found. The bug is that when too many airplanes are in the system, some of them will be lost in the system and disappear from the screen and the collision avoidance system, due to memory problems in the software. If they delay the project, many jobs and even the whole business may be at stake, but if they allow it to go through, lives could be lost, and the company may suffer as well. Emmett's decision is made easier when his boss tells him that even after sending it to the FAA, the FAA will do small-scale testing, in which the system will not be overloaded enough for the bug to occur, and in that time, Emmett's team can complete the bug fix and deliver the update when testing is done. I...