ASX CHESS replacement project failure
The Australian Securities Exchange abandoned its multi-year project to replace its core clearing and settlement system with a blockchain-based platform after spending hundreds of millions of dollars, delaying the market's critical infrastructure upgrade by years.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
The Australian Securities Exchange abandoned its multi-year project to replace its core clearing and settlement system with a blockchain-based platform after spending hundreds of millions of dollars, delaying the market's critical infrastructure upgrade by years.
What the software actually got wrong
An independent review found the new software was far more complex to build than anticipated and was not sufficiently mature or tested to safely replace the exchange's mission-critical settlement system, forcing ASX to scrap years of blockchain-based development work.
An independent review found the new software was far...
An independent review found the new software was far more complex to build than anticipated and was not sufficiently mature or tested to safely replace the exchange's mission-critical settlement system, forcing ASX to scrap years of blockchain-based development work.
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
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