When depicting a patient's heart beat on her EKG machine, KAREL sometimes experiences trouble drawing a continuous graph. Instead, KAREL draws the graph of a heart beat until she hits the end of her EKG screen. She then retraces back through the graph, deleting the lines in the process, and redraws the next heart beat on a newly erased screen. In the few instances when it pops up, the bug precludes an absolutely continous monitoring of a patient's pulse.
The subtle bug in the programming has frustrated even your best programmers -- its origins in the code are cryptic. Indeed, the bug pops up rarely, and seemingly randomly, during trial runs.
You desperately want some advice on dealing with this predicament. Thus you sleep -- hoping that the deities of Managerial Sympathy will inspire your dreams. And in your daily reveries, John Stuart Mill materializes Ð giving you three options to approach the situation. You can:
1. Rewrite the buggy code and retest the software. After all, the greatest amount of happiness may only be maximized with a soundproof product -- one that will allay any patient's concerns about an incompetent nurse. Rewriting the code may extend the production of KAREL by six months.
2. Inform hospitals about the flaw and work on a software patch in the meantime. Employing programmers to recode for an additional six months would be quite a financial burden without having a source of income from the product itself. Creating documentation and literature for the bug would require an additional three months of production time.
3. Ignore the bug. The flaw is, after all, small and rare. Perhaps the pleasure gained by releasing KAREL as soon as possible would outweigh any pain that might be caused by the bug. KAREL could be released immediately if you opt to ignore.
After delineating these options, Mill travels back to philosopher heaven, to finish an arm wrestling match with Kant. Refreshed from your nap, you wake up with an urge to perform some utilitarian calculus, to determine which one of the three paths you should take. You finally decide to:
