The End Result - Air Traffic Control System Crash

Last week's air traffic control system crash saw airports such as Heathrow and Gatwick incur severe delays and talks of possible closures. All of which meant a major loss of revenue and thousands of stranded, unhappy travelers, not to mention a safety risk.

An IT upgrade or, in this case, the testing phase of an IT upgrade, should never have resulted in such chaos. The problem, common to many IT projects, does not so much lie in the fact that the test was being carried out in a "live" environment since this is nothing new but, rather, it shows that testing should not have happened at the end of the upgrade but as an integral part of it.

By incorporating testing into the overall process, bugs and weaknesses, such as air traffic controllers reporting "ghost" data, could have been identified much earlier.

The lesson for the National Air Traffic Services is clear: take the risk out of IT changes by testing earlier and more regularly.

The Guardian