I remeber reading they only ran the program for some thing like 16 days for testing. when testing you should get as near as you can to the real thing stoping the test short of the expected life cycle is not a good idea. been programing RPG for like 15 years and design and testing are 99% or more the reason for failure 1% is the failure rate down to the compiler/ programing language/operating system (% are questamates). Testing should bring that up and using alternate commands/routines should work around such problems.

they should be using 3 processors/programming languages tied to a vote system if 2 come forward with the same response do it. they use to do it for mission critical systems. but even this approach has problems as if the programing teams are one of the same or trained in the same manner then the structure and tecqueues could contain the same inherted problems.

one thing that shows different design / test cultures is that ibm mini computers have a lower lock up while being used rate than wintel based systems.