As some may know, I had the pleasure of spending Friday night and most of Saturday in the hospital. Disclaimer: I'm fine, just have a little something called Athletic Heart Syndrome and 8 stitches in my eye from fainting and introducing my face to the ground at Pho Saigon on North Lamar Friday night. Anyways, while the experience itself was pretty awful, my programming mind could not help but be in awe of the vast amounts of software around me that keep everything running smoothly.
The software on the electrocardiogram displays information about my heart and lets me and the staff know how many times my heart misses beats and stores this information the entire time I am there. Alarms are constantly being fired from different devices as the result of hardware communicating with software that something important has happened. It is imperative that the software running on these devices work absolutely as they are understood to. If somebody's heart stops and no one is alerted, I think we have a serious software issue! (Assuming the alarm happens at the software level)
I had the pleasure of having a sonogram, which is basically an ultrasound of the heart. Seriously, the software running on this machine was incredible. The nurse could click on different parts of my heart, and it would say how long each part of my heart was, it could differentiate between in and out flow color coded by red and blue. Of course the hardware is also very impressive, but being a programmer I can understand the amount of research and work that must have gone into designing that. If the software wrongly interpreted the data coming from the hardware, we could end up with false positives or negatives. I would imagine in a medical situation both of these are bad things. False positives mean that the patient could go home thinking he or she is fine when really that person has issues. False negatives mean that the patient could undergo expensive and possibly harmful treatment to a person that is actually o.k.
At the base of it, software in the medical world really has a low margin for error. How would you feel if a bug in software you wrote caused harm, even fatal harm, to another human being? Take a look at the Therac-25. It is a radiation therapy machine involved in at least 6 incidents between 1985-1987 because of a race condition with a byte counter that often overflowed. The other thing you might ask is: Is there really any code that isn't bug free? Well, when you write code, you introduce bugs. That's life, but we can minimize and reduce these bugs by following proper software engineering techniques and really believing in them. When you test, test as if someone's life depended on it. When you are getting ready to release software, ask yourself if someone's life were dependent on the software working correctly that they would be o.k. I would really like to see what kind of software engineering workflows are used in medical software and other life-dependent software such as aviation controls.
When you "buy into" some aspect of an engineering workflow like Test-Driven Development, treat it as if someone's life were dependent on it. That is what medical software engineers have to do, and I imagine it will make you a much more serious programmer if you treat it like they have to.
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