Software Engineering
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50 free Software Engineering trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Software engineering is a young profession with a surprisingly colorful past. Its vocabulary is full of in-jokes, its history turns on a handful of stubborn personalities, and some of its most expensive lessons came down to a single misplaced character. This quiz collects the fun facts that software engineers trade over coffee: where everyday terms really came from, who wrote the code that mattered, how well-known programming languages got their names, and how small mistakes grounded aircraft, wrecked spacecraft and emptied trading accounts. A few questions cover the team habits and rules of thumb that working developers live by. It is written for anyone curious about how software gets made, from students and career changers to engineers who want to test their office-trivia credentials. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few stories worth repeating at the next team lunch.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which leader of Apollo's flight-software team at MIT is credited with coining the term 'software engineering'?
Margaret Hamilton
Margaret Hamilton used the phrase so that software would be taken as seriously as hardware engineering. In 2016 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her Apollo work.
Q 02Which insect did operators tape into the logbook of Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947 as an actual 'bug'?
A moth
A moth trapped in a relay had caused the fault, and the operators noted it as the first real case of a bug being found. The logbook, insect included, is now in the Smithsonian.
Q 03Which desk companion gives its name to the debugging habit of explaining code aloud, line by line?
A rubber duck
A rubber duck comes from a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer about a research assistant who carried one around to explain his problems to. Saying each step aloud often exposes the mistake.
Q 04Which Pixar film was almost lost in 1998 when an accidental delete command erased most of its files?
Toy Story 2
Toy Story 2 survived because technical director Galyn Susman, working from home with a newborn, had a copy on her home computer. The studio's own backups had been failing for about a month.
Q 05Guido van Rossum named which programming language after a British comedy troupe he enjoyed watching?
Python
Python honors Monty Python's Flying Circus, not the snake. Its tutorials often use 'spam' and 'eggs' as example names in tribute to one of the troupe's sketches.
Q 06The agile framework Scrum, with its sprints and daily stand-ups, borrows its name from which sport?
Rugby
Rugby inspired a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper that compared fast product teams to a side moving upfield together, handing the ball from player to player.
Q 07NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 because two pieces of software disagreed about what?
Measurement units
Measurement units were the culprit: Lockheed Martin's ground software reported thruster impulse in pound-force seconds, while NASA's navigation software expected newton-seconds.
Q 08Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace described how Charles Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, a method often called the first published computer program.
Q 09Which software scare arose because many older programs stored each year using only its last two digits?
The Y2K bug
The Y2K bug meant the year 2000 could be mistaken for 1900. Preparing for it is estimated to have cost more than $300 billion worldwide.
Q 10Tux, the official mascot of the Linux kernel, is which kind of animal?
A penguin
A penguin was the idea of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who joked that he caught 'penguinitis' after one nibbled him at a zoo in Canberra, Australia.
Q 11Linus Torvalds named which version-control system, begun in 2005, after British slang for an unpleasant person?
Git
Git was Torvalds's joke at his own expense: he said he names all his projects after himself. He built it after the Linux kernel lost free use of the BitKeeper tool.
Q 12Which two-word greeting became every beginner's first program thanks to the 1978 book The C Programming Language?
Hello, world
Hello, world spread from a sample program by Brian Kernighan, whose earliest known version appears in his 1972 tutorial for the B language.
Q 13Which European rocket destroyed itself 37 seconds into its 1996 maiden flight after a software number overflow?
Ariane 5
Q 21Fred Brooks argued that adding programmers to a late project only delays it further in which 1975 book?
The Mythical Man-Month
The Mythical Man-Month drew on Brooks's time managing IBM's OS/360, where newcomers needed time to learn the project and every extra person multiplied the lines of communication.
Q 22Which business programming language, designed in 1959 to read like English, grew out of Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC?
COBOL
COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, took shape after a Pentagon meeting in May 1959, with Hopper serving as a technical adviser to the committee.
Q 23Brendan Eich wrote the first version of which web programming language in ten days at Netscape in 1995?
JavaScript
Ariane 5 reused guidance code written for its predecessor, and converting a 64-bit number into a 16-bit integer overflowed, shutting down the inertial navigation system.
Q 14Seventeen developers wrote the Agile Manifesto in 2001 at a ski resort in which US state?
Utah
Utah's Snowbird resort hosted the meeting, whose manifesto prizes working software over comprehensive documentation and responding to change over following a plan.
Q 15Kanban boards, used by software teams to track work in progress, grew out of which carmaker's production system?
Toyota
Toyota built its just-in-time system in the late 1940s to produce only what customers demanded. Kanban is Japanese for signboard.
Q 16Ward Cunningham coined which term in 1992 for the future cost of taking coding shortcuts today?
Technical debt
Technical debt was Cunningham's way of explaining to his boss why a financial product needed reworking: shortcuts, like loans, have to be paid back later.
Q 17The authors of the influential 1994 book Design Patterns are collectively known by which nickname?
The Gang of Four
The Gang of Four are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides, whose book catalogued 23 classic patterns for object-oriented code.
Q 18Which adage says a software system's design will mirror the communication structure of the team that built it?
Conway's law
Conway's law was put forward by programmer Melvin Conway in 1967 as an observation about organizations, and is now applied mainly to software architecture.
Q 19Computer scientist Tony Hoare called which of his own 1965 inventions a 'billion-dollar mistake'?
The null reference
The null reference, a value that points at nothing, was added to the ALGOL W language and went on to become one of the most common sources of software crashes.
Q 20A hidden credit in the 1980 Atari game Adventure gave rise to which term for a secret tucked into software?
Easter egg
Easter egg was coined at Atari after programmer Warren Robinett hid his own name in a secret room, because the company would not credit its game designers.
JavaScript began life as Mocha, then became LiveScript, before taking its final name in December 1995 in a joint announcement with Sun Microsystems.
Q 24Which programming question-and-answer site, launched in 2008, had its name chosen in a vote by blog readers?
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow was created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, and the readers who voted on its name followed Atwood's programming blog, Coding Horror.
Q 25The Therac-25, whose software race conditions caused fatal overdoses in the 1980s, was what kind of medical device?
A radiotherapy machine
A radiotherapy machine built by Atomic Energy of Canada, it dropped the hardware safety interlocks of earlier models and trusted software checks alone. It is now a standard case study in software safety.
Q 26Which 2014 security bug in the widely used OpenSSL library was given its own logo and website?
Heartbleed
Heartbleed was named and branded by a Finnish security firm, bleeding-heart logo included. The flaw itself was a missing bounds check in a 'heartbeat' feature.
Q 27Which military alliance sponsored the first conference on software engineering in 1968?
NATO
NATO held the conference in the Alpine town of Garmisch and a follow-up in Rome a year later; their two reports set out how software ought to be developed.
Q 28Software teams that use their own unfinished product every day are said to be eating what?
Their own dog food
Their own dog food became tech jargon after a 1988 Microsoft email titled 'Eating our own Dogfood' urged more internal use of the company's own networking product.
Q 29Which grimly named measure counts how many key people a project could suddenly lose before stalling?
Bus factor
Bus factor comes from asking what happens if a key colleague is hit by a bus. It is also known as the lottery factor, a cheerier way of losing someone.
Q 30Six women, including Kay McNulty and Betty Snyder, were the original programmers of which early American computer?
ENIAC
ENIAC's programmers were picked from at least 200 women employed as human 'computers', yet most of them were not invited to the machine's 50th anniversary event.