1. Select ANY ONE of the examples of failed systems listed by the authors in Tab
ID: 398059 • Letter: 1
Question
1. Select ANY ONE of the examples of failed systems listed by the authors in Table 1.
2. Explain whether you agree with the authors' judgement given in Table II on why your selected system failed?
Explain why you agrees or disagree.
Submission should be no more than 1-page
HMS Titanic
had poor quality control in the manu-
facture of the wrought iron rivets. In the cold water of
April 14, 1912, when the Titanic hit the iceberg, many
rivets failed and whole sheets of the hull became unat-
tached. Therefore, verification was bad, because they
did not build the ship right. An insufficient number of
lifeboats was a requirements development failure.
However, the Titanic satisfied the needs of the ship
owners and passengers (until it sank), so validation was
OK [
Titanic,
1997]. These conclusions are in Table II.
The
Tacoma Narrows Bridge
was a scaleup of an
old design. But the strait where they built it had strong
winds: The bridge became unstable in these crosswinds
and it collapsed. The film of its collapse is available on
the Web: It is well worth watching [Tacoma-1 and
Tacoma-2]. The design engineers reused the require-
ments for an existing bridge, so these requirements
were up to the standards of the day. The bridge was built
well, so verification was OK. But it was the wrong
bridge for that environment, a validation error. [Billah
and Scanlan, 1991].
The Edsel
automobile was a fancy Ford with a
distinct vertical grille. The designers were proud of it.
The requirements were good and they were verified.
But the car didn’t sell, because people didn’t want it.
Previous marketing research for the Thunderbird was
successful, but for the Edsel, management ignored mar-
keting. Management produced what management
wanted, not what the customers wanted, and they pro-
duced the wrong car [Edsel].
IBM PCjr
was a precursor to modern laptop
computers, but it was a financial failure. The keyboard
was too small for normal sized fingers. People did not
like them and they did not buy them. Modern laptops
have normal sized keyboards and PDAs have a stylus.
It seems that there is an unwritten requirement that
things designed for fingers should be big enough to
accommodate fingers. They got the requirements
wrong. They build a nice machine with good verifica-
tion. And the success of present day laptops validates
the concept [Chapman, Bahill, and Wymore, 1992: 13].
United Nations Protection Force
(UNPRO-
FOR) was the UN mission in Bosnia prior to NATO
intervention. They had valid requirements (stopping
fighting in former Yugoslavia is valid) but these require-
ments were incomplete because a peacekeeping force
requires a cease-fire before keeping the peace. This
expanded cease-fire requirement later paved the way for
the success of NATO in the same mission. Moreover,
the UNPROFOR failed to meet its incomplete require-
ments because they were a weak force with limited
capabilities and poor coordination between countries.
UNPROFOR had incomplete requirements, and was
the wrong system at the wrong time. This was a partial
requirements failure, and a failure of verification and
validation [Andreatta, 1997].
Table I. Some Famous Failures System Name HMS Titanic Tacoma Narrows Brid Edsel automobile War in Victnam Apollo-13 Year 1912 1940 1958 1967-72 No problem statement, M 1970 1976- 2003 1983 1986 Putative cause of failure Poor quality control Scaling up an old desi Failure to discover customer needs Poor confi on mana Concorde SST It was not profitable Failure to discover customer needs nadequate testing of new technol Bureaucratic mismanagement, failure to respond to enginecrs' tcchnical concerns Bad design. Bad risk management Arrogance Mismanagement, Failure to develop realistic IBM PCIr GE refri Space Shuttle Challenger Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant 1986 Ncw Coke 1986 1988 1980sMis 1990 A-12 airplanc rements Hubble Spacc Telesc Su Ariane 5 missile UNPROFOR Bosnia Mission Lewis Spacecraft Motorola Iridium System Mars Climate Orbiter Mars Polar Lander Lack of total s Cost overruns, Failure to maintain public su Incorrect reuse of software, Faulty scalin test ucting Su 1996 1992-95No cease fire agreement, Poor coordination 1997 1999 1999 2000 2001 a Mission Design mistakes Misjudgedo Use of different units Failure of middle management Failure to anticipate terrorist threat NASA corporate culture, failure to heed lessons learned Lack of tree trimmin tition, Mispredicted technolo 11 attack on WTT Space Shuttle Columbia Northeast power outage 2002 2003Explanation / Answer
Titanic was deemed as the unsinkable ship at its launch. The ship had a luxurious setup aboard and had attracted the attention of many rich people all around the world. It held one of the biggest dining rooms of all times which could serve 500 passengers at a time. There were swimming pools, squash courts, library, Turkish baths, souvenir shops all aboard. It had the capacity to hold around 3000 people aboard.
The built of Titanic was very strong, it was deemed unsinkable. Seepage of water inside the ship was unimaginable. There were 16 water compartments in the bottom of the ship with automatic watertight doors which shut automatically if water seepage started in the ship. Such was the technological expertise used in the Titanic.
The crew considered the iceberg that came in the way of the Titanic very small. But most of the part of the iceberg was under water and was rock solid. The hit with the iceberg was so massive that 5 watertight compartments got filled with water within seconds. The watertight compartments had lost their waterproof capability as the wrought iron rivets had given way when the ship hit the iceberg. This proves the quality inefficiency of the overall ship.
There were 20 lifeboats aboard with a capacity to hold around 1100 people. Again for a ship with capacity of 3000 passengers, catering to only 1100 i.e. 35% of the passengers during emergency was a requirement development and planning failure. Women and children were the first to be evacuated from the ship. Around 1500 passengers and crewmembers drowned with the Titanic. So, it can be concluded with facts that a major factor behind Titanic’s sinking was poor quality control.
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