Charlie was elated. The team he had assembled had finally completed the design of his killer app. And the job came in under budget and on time. Well, almost under budget. Well actually, just a trifle over budget. Not enough to bother anybody. But it was on time. Well, practically on time.
What was important was that this was a terrific system. People would talk about it for a long time. And because there was nothing quite like it, the profits would be most appealing. While Charlie realized that his earnings wouldn't put him quite in a class with people like Bill Gates, he would be very comfortable. Very.
He had already issued several public announcements about his achievement. All that was needed now were some routine final tests.
Some problems came up. Though he knew that test equipment cannot always be fully trusted and that it had sometimes indicated false fails for systems that were fully in spec, and though he had full confidence in his system design, he began to suffer a degree of trepidation.
He went through the test procedures again, very carefully this time. Again, "System Failure." Very methodically now, he started testing individual modules in the system and encountered some tricky readings. He knew that was to be expected because there was a great deal of interaction in the system; it was almost impossible to isolate a module to be sure that a failure indication stemmed, in fact, from that module and not from a link.
Most puzzling was the fact that some tests showed no failures.
He couldn't be sure that a problem-if there was a problem-was related to hardware or software. He kept hoping that the problem lay in the test gear, not in the system, because the system was very complex and tracking down system faults would be difficult, costly and very time-consuming.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much time left, since he had already announced successful completion of the system. What to do?
Suddenly an epiphany. He'd been reading about still another failure in tests of the nation's anti-missile defense system. Some senators advocated more stringent testing to check the system's ability to catch decoys and other countermeasures an enemy might employ to foil the system.
But the Senate, perhaps assuming that an enemy would be considerate enough to alert us to the timing and location of a missile launch against us, rejected the idea of tougher testing. And that was Charlie's inspiration.
He eliminated the tests that showed faults. He then announced that the system had successfully passed all relevant tests.
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