Michael Krigsman reports some 40 IT Failures caused by Software Bugs from the Software QA Test Resource Center.

What struck me immediately were the following

1. Many of these failures were the result of “software taking bad Decisions”.
2. It took a huge effort in some cases to rectify the total damage, to customers specifically
3. It requires a huge testing effort to validate these systems before rolling them out

Here are some of the interesting ones

1. A software error reportedly resulted in over-billing of up to several thousand dollars to each of 11,000 customers of a major telecommunications company in June of 2006. It was reported that the software bug was fixed within days, but that correcting the billing errors would take much longer.
2. In early 2006 problems in a government?s financial monitoring software resulted in incorrect election candidate financial reports being made available to the public. The government?s election finance reporting web site had to be shut down until the software was repaired.
3. Media reports in January of 2005 detailed severe problems with a $170 million high-profile U.S. government IT systems project. Software testing was one of the five major problem areas according to a report of the commission reviewing the project. In March of 2005 it was decided to scrap the entire project.

Preventing & Recovering from Bad Decisions

BRMS cannot help with all kinds of software problems, but they are best when it comes to software driven business decisions.

As I have maintained in the past, using rule engines and business rules management systems, helps you with exactly these kind of problems.I have talked about this before, here is why

• Using BRMS and rule engines helps you write maintainable applications that lend themselves to change. 
• When Sh** hits the Fan, you need your business guys, and here is how you can involve them using business rules technology
• When you discover errors in your rules, because the rules are externalized, turn-around times for testing is much, much faster.I have discussed this here, here and here