Knight Capital's $440M Loss Blamed on Developers

I'm surprised that my inbox wasn't spammed by every software testing company last week, telling me how they could have prevented the Knight Capital Group financial software fiasco. Knight on Tuesday last week installed new trading software and immediately the software went to work, but not in a good way. Instead, the trades made by the new software bled the company of $440 million in stock value after two days of trading. Once company officials pinpointed it to software, the trading system was knocked offline, but the damage had already been done.

Indeed, company officials pinned the blame on its software developers, which makes me wonder: a) How could a bug as damaging as that one gone undetected all the way to its installation onto production servers? b) What kind of testing regimen did the software developers put the code through? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the developers did rigorous testing of the system ahd that those developers are being made scapegoats.

Posted by Michael Domingo on 08/03/2012 at 11:59 AM