Sri Lanka fuel-rationing QR app failures
Sri Lanka's government-mandated QR-code app for rationing scarce fuel during its 2022 economic crisis repeatedly failed at fuel stations nationwide, worsening the chaos of an already severe fuel shortage.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
Sri Lanka's government-mandated QR-code app for rationing scarce fuel during its 2022 economic crisis repeatedly failed at fuel stations nationwide, worsening the chaos of an already severe fuel shortage.
What the software actually got wrong
The app depended on real-time mobile data connectivity that was unreliable across much of the country, and its servers and software had not been built to handle the simultaneous load of fuel stations and drivers nationwide trying to register and validate QR codes at once.
The app depended on real-time mobile data connectivity that...
The app depended on real-time mobile data connectivity that was unreliable across much of the country
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.
Its servers and software had not been built to...
its servers and software had not been built to handle the simultaneous load of fuel stations and drivers nationwide trying to register and validate QR codes at once
Requs AI Software FMEA traces this failure mode back to the system-level hazard it feeds, tagging it against the Common Defect Enumeration so it surfaces in review instead of in the field.
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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