Imagine grasping multiplication and division before the age of four. Most people were still learning to tie their shoes. For Ann Marie Neufelder, founder of Mission Ready Software, numbers had already become familiar friends. From the moment she first flipped through her father's science and technology magazines, becoming an engineer was simply a matter of when. Her path into the field seemed written into her DNA. However, the journey itself required tireless passion, relentless drive, and a sense of purpose.
Neufelder paved her path in engineering over four decades ago. With a degree from a leading science and research institution, where she navigated a male-dominated environment, Neufelder took a job as an intern at a large technology firm, applying her proficiency in probability and statistics to predict the likelihood of failure in critical transportation systems. At the time, she found the work novel, interesting even, but not yet compelling.
Honing her expertise, Neufelder moved to a computing firm that was racing to stay competitive in the industry. There, she was tasked with developing a model to predict software failures, essentially applying what she had done for transportation to software code. She gathered real-world failure data, one of the first to do so in a structured, engineering-focused way. This work opened her eyes to how subtle and complex software failure modes are and, most importantly, the consequences of ignoring them.
Still, Neufelder saw her future as a software engineer in the defense sector and not a reliability specialist. That changed one day while simply talking on the telephone while writing code.
Neufelder accidentally commented out a single line of code, an oversight that caused the entire system to fail to start. The acceptance test had to be postponed. For those working in defense-related fields, rescheduling such a test is no small matter. "It was a really jarring moment of realization," she shares. "It hit me that the software I wrote wasn't just an abstract problem to solve or a puzzle to decode. It could delay missions, impact operations, and risk lives. I thought to myself: This isn't theoretical anymore. This is real."
That single line of faulty code became a line in the sand. From that moment, Neufelder found her new mission. No longer interested in simply writing code or analyzing post-mortem failures, she wanted to stop software defects before they ever had a chance to do damage. "Suddenly, everything was about making the systems we rely on resilient and safe," Neufelder states.
With encouragement from a colleague and a contract from a major defense organization, Neufelder built models that could predict software reliability before a single line of code was written. The models she inherited were limited, narrowly focused on specialized systems, and only useful late in development, such as when it was too expensive or too late to fix critical flaws. "I rewrote the models from scratch to improve accuracy, as well as expand their applicability across industries," says Neufelder.
The journey was rough, to say the least. Neufelder needed access to real data, and she needed to fund her work. She then turned to the commercial technology sector, specifically to advanced manufacturing, which at the time was struggling with unreliable software. Industry leaders invited her to assess vendors and collect data.
This opened the door to a goldmine of failure case studies, from manufacturing tools to medical devices, autonomous vehicles, solar systems, petroleum operations, and beyond. Essentially, Neufelder became a historian of software failure, compiling a dataset of a vast number of cases, each with its own lessons.
The culmination of this work is Mission Ready Software, a company she founded that offers comprehensive tools, such as the Requs Software FMEA, to help prevent critical software failures before they occur. It aims to close gaps in conventional software development by enabling early prediction of reliability risks, applying intelligent pattern recognition, and giving teams the ability to see failure before it manifests in code or operation.
Mission Ready Software reflects Neufelder's vision for impact. It's her way of making sure others don't have to spend 30 years sifting through failure reports to gain the foresight she now has. "I'm not doing this to hoard knowledge or stay ahead. I want the next generation of engineers to have the ability to see and understand the root causes, which are often in plain sight, and build systems that work in complex real-world scenarios," Neufelder shares.
Indeed, the world doesn't need more gatekeeping. It demands readiness, and Mission Ready Software is the expression of Ann Marie Neufelder's purpose to ensure others can see what she sees: the warning signs before disaster strikes.
