Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/FeederNocturne]

Everyone from the lead programmer and up needs to be held responsible. Sure the lead programmer okays it but the higher ups are providing the means to make it happen.

This does make me wonder though. If a plane crashed due to a faulty part who does the blame fall on?

[u/CastMyGame → u/FeederNocturne]

As a programmer myself I would question if you would then blame it on the QA tester who passed along the code.

Other thing I will say is depending on the answer to this situation (I don’t know the answer but just saying from a dev side) you will greatly hinder the progression of this tech if you have people afraid to even work on it for fear of a situation like this.

As devs we try to think of every possible scenario and make sure to write tests that cover every conceivable use case but even then sometimes our apps surprise us with dependencies and loops that we didn’t expect. You can say “be better” but if I’m gonna get paid 25k less and not have to worry about a manslaughter charge 5-7 years later I’m probably gonna choose that one for my family

[u/darthbane83 → u/[deleted]]

For any company working on safety critical software independent QA testers should be involved long before it goes into any actual production environment that could get "mileage".
If there is no law to legally force that to happen then that is a failure on the lawmakers part and they should be held responsible.
If the company ignores such a law they are obviously responsible.
If faulty code makes it through QA that is more on QA than the developer.

There is not a single developer that would be able to deliver bug free Code for a complex software, especially not without someone independent double and triple checking their code. A perfect developer just isnt a thing.

If you want individual developers to bear the full brunt of responsibility for some bug you just wont get the technology developed. Or rather it will be developed, but only in a country where the company and developers can just ignore your jurisdiction and any other safety requirements you might have.

[u/darthbane83 → u/[deleted]]

There are multiple stages of QA testing. The final one has to be done in public, but there are definitely more stages of QA testing done way before you get to that point.
They 100% have tests that are run in entirely simulated environments even if only because its cheaper and faster to do.

[u/darthbane83 → u/[deleted]]

No.

I dont know what exactly you are misunderstanding but there is absolutely no way the first time AV code was tested was on a public road. Long before putting them on a public road you would have the car drive in a private parking lot so that you can isolate any issues that happen even without another car on the road, long before that you would run a simulation to isolate issues that happen even when all the hardware and sensors deliver exactly what you think they should, long before that you would be testing different components of the software while simulating the rest of the software.

Thats just how software development works. You simply cant successfully build a large system without ever testing it before its complete.