[jasonmaydie]

The implementation of this cheating is more insidious than you think. There could be a requirement to put in a "simulation" for testing. There's nothing unusual about implementing this feature. Then another request comes in at a later time to make this feature a build setting. Then at a later time someone who is not a software engineer toggles this build setting on production build during manufacturing to put it out in the field.

[Verdex_3]

Hear hear. When building a bridge it's obvious when they're building a test bridge or a real life bridge for people to drive over.

"So you want to spend 100 million dollars on a bridge that you're only using for testing purposes. And you want to put this bridge right where it would be really useful to put a real bridge to handle rush hour traffic. And you have a deal with the city to collect toll payments for this 'test' bridge for the next 50 years. Yeah, I don't think we're going to be cutting any corners for the 'test' bridge."

VS

"You want me to take 2 hours to add in a test feature that can be conditionally compiled in for testing purposes? Also I talked to John in testing and they actually want this feature for testing. Seems legit."

Two months later. "Hey, I found this test feature that would allow us to cheat on the regulations. All we have to do is set this compile flag to true. The programmers even made this neat UI that allows us to change the build configurations without having to talk to them."

[cmiles74]

In addition, I think it's much easier to go back into the field and examine a bridge to ensure that something important was constructed to the specifications that you required. This is not the case with most of the software people write, certainly in this case it's pretty difficult for a developer to pull a car of the production line and verify that the code they wrote made it into the car without any changes.