Refer to:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huyge...ate_050115.html
An entire data channel from Huygens was lost due to a simple coding error. I've done software cockups like this. Fortunately co-workers have always detected my screwups before the problem got serious. This sort of human error is a fact-of-life. The cures are redundancy (use pilot/copilot programming teams) and super robust design, i.e. make the software and hardware fault tolerant and/or self correcting. This type of mind set gets immediately crushed if the program managers are accountants and/or MBAs. Their holy matras are "don't reinvent the wheel", "if it isn't broken, don't fix it", "reduce duplication to save cost", "faster, better, cheaper", etc. Project failure is almost assured if the project is managed by a bean counter with no engineering common sense (now standard practice).
Gary
One data channel of two on Huygens was lost due to software error