At a recent software engineering management course in the US, the participants
were given an awkward question to answer. ‘If you had just boarded an airliner and
discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight
control software, how many of you would disembark immediately?’ Among the
forest of raised hands, only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would d
o, he replied that he would be quite content to stay onboard. With his team’s
software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off.