Wired News has a very interesting article on History’s worst software flaws.
It makes me think of my worst software bug when I first started off as an ASP developer right out of college. I was working on a large music community website and was told to implement a “Forgot Password” feature. Sounds easy enough. I coded it, ran a quick test, and then deployed it (that alone should rankle your feathers).
We didn’t quite have a formal deployment process at the time. A few days later, we find out that the code never sent out any emails, and never logged who made the requests, leaving us no way to really know how many users were affected.
I believe we found out (and my memory is hazy here), through a relative of our client’s president. After reviewing the code, there was no way it could have sent out emails. There was a glaring bug in there, which makes me wonder how it passed my test.
In any case, I coded on egg shells for a while after that, fearing I might lose my first coding job.