Charles has made his slides available in odp and ppt. Mike has also made his slides available, as pdf.

We are going to do something a bit different this month by presenting two short presentations instead of one long boring one. The theme will be computer aided disasters and how to prevent such mishaps.

At the February meeting of UUASC-OC, Mike Elliott, who has spoken to us many times in the past, will start off by showing us how programming errors and improper testing resulted in some famous aerospace and other assorted disasters. Then, Charles Wyble will make his second Orange County talk in recent months by focusing on how to provide good quality assurance testing.

Mike will explain how poor software combined with sloppy test methods were found to be the root cause behind several airlines crashes, NASA space flights, and even a Patriot missile miscue, many of which resulted in casualties. Charles will then present web application testing beyond static pattern checks. Utilizing tools such as Watir and Webload/Paros, he will show how to integrate fully automated testing for web sites and integrate that with Nagios.

Mike is a longtime object-oriented programmer, engineer, and software manager who has taken an increased focus on safety-critical software. He recently became a member of the committee developing DO-178C, the international standard for certification of airborne computer systems.

Charles is a systems engineer with seven years of experience who runs Known Element Enterprises, a professional services firm. He has contributed to many open source projects, including OpenOffice, Wine, and Gnumeric, and to proprietary software, most notably VmWare Workstation.