Ten stories of loss, from communication with aircraft and spacecraft to catastrophic launch failure to the death of hundreds of passengers when an airliner strikes a hill on final approach. What do these stories have in common? Structured, rigorous validation and verification of software requirements, implementation and change management could have prevented them all. Here we will learn of hard-won lessons about the kinds of software defects and defect-defeating options available to project managers, system and software engineers, software assurance engineers...key players in the complex, unforgiving environment where software is needed to control hardware and human risk decisions are always involved.