Canada's ArriveCAN app bugs and cost overruns
Canada's mandatory COVID-19 travel-declaration app, ArriveCAN, incorrectly told an estimated 10,000 fully vaccinated travelers to quarantine, and a subsequent audit found its development cost had ballooned to roughly CAD $54 million for what auditors said should have been a much simpler build.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
Canada's mandatory COVID-19 travel-declaration app, ArriveCAN, incorrectly told an estimated 10,000 fully vaccinated travelers to quarantine, and a subsequent audit found its development cost had ballooned to roughly CAD $54 million for what auditors said should have been a much simpler build.
What the software actually got wrong
A software bug in the app's vaccination-status logic caused it to misclassify some vaccinated travelers as needing to quarantine, and Canada's Auditor General found poor program management and inadequate documentation contributed to both the technical errors and the program's runaway costs.
A software bug in the app's vaccination-status logic caused...
A software bug in the app's vaccination-status logic caused it to misclassify some vaccinated travelers as needing to quarantine
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.
Canada's Auditor General found poor program management and inadequate...
Canada's Auditor General found poor program management and inadequate documentation contributed to both the technical errors and the program's runaway costs
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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