Only a thorough assessment of Knight Capital's software development lifecycle will tell us what happened at the New York Stock Exchange on Aug. 1, 2012, experts say. (Image courtesy of Ryan Lawler via )

George Dinwiddie, principal consultant at iDIA Computing, also recommends an assessment. Any company can assess its organization using a tool called a retrospective, Dinwiddle says. The retrospective is a formal "look back" process that considers what is actually happening, what the risks are and how the team can improve.

In the Army, retrospectives are called "after-action-reviews." The latest thinking in software, though, is to have the conversation before the software is deployed in order to catch and fix the problem. The provides a host of options.

One effective method I recommend is to ask what is going right, what is going wrong, and what we (the team) should do differently. Team members create cards to list what they would like to talk about, then vote by placing a dot on the cards to decide what to talk about. The team discusses the two most heavily dotted items in each category.