Anyone who uses a computer knows what it’s like to have the system crash. Crashes are the digital world’s addition to that short list of inevitables, death and taxes. But what whether you could record the crash and play it back, like a video recorder for software?

That notion inspired two software engineers, Jonathan Lindo and Jeffrey Daudel, to devise such a product. They have succeeded, and are now moving from the niche market where they proved the notion and onto a bigger stage.

System crashes and other software flaws are more than an annoyance. A 2002 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States estimated that software flaws cost the economy there as much as $59.5 billion a year.

For software developers, the flaws that cause crashes rank among their biggest problems, particularly the ones that cannot be reproduced, like the noise in the car engine that disappears when you visit

Lindo says he and Daudel found themselves overwhelmed by bugs they could not find while working together at an Net start-up in 2002. “We were spending nearly all of our date not fixing the issues, but trying to get to the point where we could just see the issue, and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great whether we could just TiVo that and replay it?’” Lindo recalls.

Innovation by analogy is a robust concept, says Giovanni Gavetti, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School who, with his colleague Jan Rivkin, has published research on how businesses can use analogic reasoning as a strategic tool. Human beings are analogy machines, he notes, dealing with new knowledge by comparing it to things they already know something about.

It would take duration for Lindo and Daudel to prove that their analogy worked. They were tackling a daunting problem –…

Orginal post by Top Tech News