🔗 Be Suspicious of Success

Successful software is buggy software.

From Leslie Lamport's Specifying Systems:

You should be suspicious if [the model checker] does not find a violation of a liveness property... you should also be suspicious if [it] finds no errors when checking safety properties.

This is specifically in the context of model-checking a formal specification, but it's a widely applicable software principle. It's not enough for a program to work, it has to work for the right reasons. Code working for the wrong reasons is code that's going to break when you least expect it. And since "correct for right reasons" is a much narrower target than "correct for any possible reason," we can't assume our first success is actually our intended success.

Hence, BSOS: Be Suspicious of Success.

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