Originally Posted by
Ian W
The Boeing engineers did not have the luxury of starting from a clean sheet and "getting it right by design". They had stiffware that has been operational for years and had to modify the code so that the FCCs operated in a different way without changing anything that was not essential to change for the task at hand and without breaking any current functions. Maintenance programming especially of embedded code and modifying the code so it does things differently without affecting anything else is nothing like simple code writing. It is possible that some very basic timing issue made the live aircraft slightly different to the avionics test bench. This is the reason regression tests are run when the new code is ported to and implemented in the aircraft - and the tests found an issue - that is what the tests are for.
If it helps, think of it like this...