project of about 2500 function points) were political opponents. They both devoted the bulk of their energies to challenging and criticizing the work products of the opposite teams." Not surprisingly the project was abandoned after costing the company $1.5 million.2.3 Incorrect analysis and assumptions - the Three Mile Island accidentIncorrect assumptions can seem very obvious when they are thought about, however it does not stop them from creeping in. According to Neumann a Gemini V rocket landed a hundred miles off course because of an error in the software. The programmer used the Earth’s reference point relative to the Sun, as elapsed time since launch, as a fixed constant. However the programmer did not realise that the Earth position relative to the Sun does not come back to the same point 24 hours later. As a result the error accumulated while the rocket was in space. The Three Mile Island II nuclear accident, on 28th March 1979, was also blamed on assuming too much. The accident started in the cooling system when one of the pipes became blocked, resulting in the temperature of the fuel rods increased from 600 degrees to over 4000 degrees. Instruments used to measure the temperature of the reactor core was not standard equipment at the time, however thermocouples had been installed and could measure high temperatures. However after the temperature reached over 700 degrees the thermocouples had been programmed to produce a string of question marks instead of displaying the temperature. After the reactor started to over-heat the turbines shut down automatically. However this did not stop the rods from over-heating as someone had left the valves for the secondary cooling system closed. There was no way of knowing this at the time because there was no reading on the temperature of the reactor core.Operators testified to the commission that there were so many valves that sometimes the would get left in the wrong position, even t...
