Common Application 2013 website redesign failures
A major redesign of the Common Application, used by hundreds of US colleges for admissions, suffered severe technical problems right as students began submitting applications for fall 2014 admission, forcing many colleges to extend deadlines.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
A major redesign of the Common Application, used by hundreds of US colleges for admissions, suffered severe technical problems right as students began submitting applications for fall 2014 admission, forcing many colleges to extend deadlines.
What the software actually got wrong
The rebuilt platform had not been adequately tested at the scale and complexity of a live college-admissions season, and students and counselors reported submission failures, data loss, and formatting errors that the Common Application organization struggled to fix throughout the fall.
The rebuilt platform had not been adequately tested at...
The rebuilt platform had not been adequately tested at the scale and complexity of a live college-admissions season
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.
Students and counselors reported submission failures, data loss
students and counselors reported submission failures, data loss
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.
Formatting errors that the Common Application organization struggled to...
formatting errors that the Common Application organization struggled to fix throughout the fall
Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA together treat this as a known, catalogued defect pattern — not a novel surprise — so it gets tested for deliberately rather than discovered after deployment.
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.
Schedule a demonstration, or explore how Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA use the Common Defect Enumeration.