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At The Guardian, Cathy O'Neil writes about why algorithms can be wrong. She classifies the reasons into four categories on a spectrum ranging from unintential errors to outright malfeasance. As algorithms now make a large portion of the decisions affecting our lives, scrutiny is ever more important and she provides multiple examples in each category of their impact.
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How Can We Stop Algorithms From Lying?
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We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:29AM (1 child)
I always say that the testers need to be smarter and better than their developers. How else can they find problems that the developers missed? Making proper automated tests, especially integration style tests, is difficult.
I think achieving 100% coverage is possible, but no company is ever going to spend that much on quality. And for many a software product, this is not that big of a problem, your testing really needs to reflect what you are building, and how.
There are also many layers to testing, if your developers haven't done any significant testing themselves, you've already lost.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:29PM
As someone pointed out above - full coverage for any non-trivial program is not possible, as it implies testing *all* possible inputs for unexpected corner cases - and the combinatorics involved in that explode rapidly. Even just "a*b" using 32-bit values has 2^64 possibilities that would have to be tested.