Torts - Cheh-Cheng Wang ex rel. the United States of America v. FMC Corp.: False Claims Act Bar May be Overturned by Pending Legislation

In Wang ex rel. The United States v. FMC Corp. the Ninth Circuit held that a private individual (a qui tam plaintiff) cannot base a suit on behalf of the government under the False Claims Act on publicly known information unless she played a role in making the allegations public. In doing so, the court affirmed dismissal of a suit brought by an engineer who had direct and independent knowledge of the information underlying the allegations. The court stated that [q]ui tam suits are meant to encourage insiders privy to a fraud on the government to blow the whistle on the crime. In such a scheme, there is little point in rewarding a second toot. The Ninth Circuit\u27s holding is controversial. The False Claims Amendments Act of 1992, passed by the House in August, 1992, is incompatible with it. This note considers Wang in the light of prior and pending legislation

Torts - Cheh-Cheng Wang ex rel. the United States of America v. FMC Corp.: False Claims Act Bar May be Overturned by Pending Legislation

In Wang ex rel. The United States v. FMC Corp. the Ninth Circuit held that a private individual (a qui tam plaintiff) cannot base a suit on behalf of the government under the False Claims Act on publicly known information unless she played a role in making the allegations public. In doing so, the court affirmed dismissal of a suit brought by an engineer who had direct and independent knowledge of the information underlying the allegations. The court stated that [q]ui tam suits are meant to encourage insiders privy to a fraud on the government to blow the whistle on the crime. In such a scheme, there is little point in rewarding a second toot. The Ninth Circuit\u27s holding is controversial. The False Claims Amendments Act of 1992, passed by the House in August, 1992, is incompatible with it. This note considers Wang in the light of prior and pending legislation

Why Software Quality Professionals Should Actively Oppose The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act

this article before July 22, 1999, I urge you to write a letter to the members of NCCUSL from your State, asking them to oppose UCITA. If you read it in the July 20-30 timeframe, you can send a letter to me and I will see that it reaches the NCCUSL members from your state. After July 30, send opposition letters to your state representative

The Law of Software Quality

I’m in the business of improving software customer satisfaction. I approach customer satisfaction from several angles. I’ve been a programmer, tester, writer, teacher, user interface designer, software salesperson, and a manager of user documentation, software testing, and software development, an organization development consultant and an attorney focusing on the law of software quality. These have provided many insights into relationships between computes, software, developers, and customers. I do the following types of work: ⌧ Training: I offer this course (Black Box Software Testing), and shorter courses on » Recruiting Software Testers (1 day) » Concise Test Planning (1 day at conferences, 1.5 days at customer sites) » Test Automation (2 days — I co-teach this with Doug Hoffman) ⌧ Consulting to software companies: Primarily, I help software companies do better testing. I sometimes help companies improve their user documentation or help them with broader software development management issues. ⌧ Legal services: I represent authors, programmers, and testers (I help consultants negotiate deals o

The Impossibility of Complete Testing

This paper explores three themes: 1. I think that I've figured out how to explain the impossibility of complete testing to managers and lawyers, with examples that they can understand. These are my notes. 2. A peculiar breed of snake-oil sellers reassure listeners that you achieve complete testing by using their coverage monitors. Wrong. Complete line and branch coverage is not complete testing. It will miss significant classes of bugs. 3. If we can't do complete testing, what should we do? It seems to me that at the technical level and at the legal level, we should be thinking about "good enough testing," done with as part of a strategy for achieving "good enough software." Tutorial on Impossibility You probably know this material, but you might find these notes useful for explaining the problem to others. Complete testing is impossible for several reasons: . We can't test all the inputs to the progra

Software Engineering and UCITA, 18 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 435 (2000)

This article investigates the software engineering community\u27s direct opposition to UCITA. The author begins by detailing the adverse effect of UCITA on software development and how it will interfere with public interest. Secondly, the author expounds on the rules governing intellectual property and how UCITA would interfere with both users and creators in this field. Thirdly, the author lays out UCITA\u27s rules relating to electronic communication and its uncostly bearings on e-mail. Next, the author explains how UCITA interferes with engineering practices. Furthermore, the author provides a glimpse of UCITA\u27s interference with software engineers and small consulting firms. Lastly, the author a list of disadvantages that UCITA has on small businesses

Liability for Defective Documentation

Several companies are careless about the accuracy of their user manuals and online help, leading readers to believe that a product has characteristics that it lacks. Under American law, buyers of goods have a right to expect a manufacturer to stand behind its claims. False claims in documentation might subject the manufacturer to liability for breach of warranty, fraud, or deceptive trade practices. Warranty law has been evolving recently, with the development of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act and revisions to the Uniform Commercial Code

ABSTRACT Teaching Domain Testing: A Status Report

Domain testing is a stratified sampling strategy for choosing a few test cases from the near infinity of candidate test cases. The strategy goes under several names, such as equivalence partitioning, boundary analysis, and category partitioning. This paper describes a risk-focused interpretation of domain testing and some results (experiential and experimental) of helping students learn this approach

Liability for Defective Content

Software publishers and information service providers publish information about their own products and about other products and people. Additional content might be incidental, such as discussion of the practice of accounting in documentation of a bookkeeping program. Or it may relate to a publisher’s product, such as papers on the nature of a disease at the Web site of a manufacturer of a device used to diagnose that disease. Other content is irrelevant to the product, such as political articles on a company’s Web site. In all of these cases, the publisher’s technical publications or quality control staff might wonder whether they should check accuracy and tone of this content that is not direct documentation of the product under development. This article considers a variety of potential legal grounds for holding publishers accountable for content errors