Recently, I found myself having to write up some concerns I have about race conditions in an application that is in development (not by me). This will likely be brought to the attention of stakeholders who are non-technical and with whom I do not have a direct line of communication, so my explanation needs to be in written form.
I have already made an attempt at this write-up. I gloss over the technical specifics as best I can, give an example of how a race condition would occur in the application, and describe its impact. I feel I did pretty well, but it’s far from perfect.
The problem is, as much as I try to shield the reader from computer science, I have still found it difficult to eliminate phrases like ‘threads of execution’ and ‘mutual exclusion’ without losing correctness and substance. The risk is that, with too much hand-waving, these concerns could be dismissed as a made-up boogeyman.
Anyway, my question to you is this: How would you explain race conditions to a non-technical audience? Would you dare to explain CPU scheduling? Would you invoke the dining philosophers?
You don’t have to work within the constraints of my situation (but it would be awesomely helpful if you did).
Company X has $1,000 in the bank. X pays a rent of $2,000 and received a payment of $10,000 for services rendered to company Y. However, due to a race condition, X is in deficit of $1,000 and is now applying for bankruptcy. =(
You might want to explain how the bank handles company X’s account in this way: Bank staff A takes the current value of $1,000 and adds $10,000 to it. Bank staff B takes the current value of $1,000 and subtracts $2,000 from it. Bank staff A updates the value to $11,000. Bank staff B updates the value to -$1,000.