I was a grad student in Dave Akin's lab from 1994-2003. Like many labs, we had a journal club. Once a week (Wednesday, I think) somebody would give a presentation over lunch on a paper they'd read. We would get takeout Chinese and eat while discussing the paper.
On this particular Wednesday the presentation was on a failed spacecraft program. It's been a long time, but I think it was probably this paper:
https://llis.nasa.gov/llis_lib/pdf/1009464main1_0641-mr.pdf
which is the initial failure analysis of the Mars Climate Orbiter (1999), which famously crashed into Mars during its orbital insertion burn because JPL specifications were in metric, but Lockheed wrote code in imperial units, and as a result there was a failure to properly convert between newtons and pounds. One fact of note was that the the team responsible for spacecraft navigation had already observed anomalous trajectory data but their reports were ignored because they didn't follow program guidelines for filling out the paperwork to document the observations, so the insertion burn went ahead heedless of what the spacecraft's behavior was trying to tell them.
Ultimately, the loss of mission was a result of unclear responsibility for ownership of the orbital maneuvering software, including the mission requirements that traced to the software, the development of the software derived from those requirements, tests to validate the software, and reports from users of the software that it was behaving unexpectedly.
I was trying to be funny, and turned the statement around from "clear lines of responsibility" to "clear lines of blame".
