[smoyer]

So we know there were catastrophic bugs in the 737 Max, they've found additional bugs that haven't been catastrophic yet and now we hear that the Starliner also has software bugs. I'm going to order a copy of "The Mythical Man-Month" for Boeing ... they need to get way back to the basics.

(Where's Margaret Hamilton when you need here?

[trhway]

> I'm going to order a copy of "The Mythical Man-Month" for Boeing

too late. Boeing is already deep in Agile, a methodology which promises that a child can be delivered by the way of 9 incremental monthly deliveries.

https://www.infosysconsultinginsights.com/2019/06/12/the-ris...

"Boeing was an early Agile adopter in 2008 surpassing its rival, Airbus, in 2012 by deploying a newly renovated 737 Max 8 faster to market.

[...]

The 2008 article Boeing Frontiers- Goin’ Agile by Doug Cantwell from Boeing describes how Boeing, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, created an Agile lab to move changes to the aircraft to market it faster, cutting down flight test times from months to days. "

[tracerbulletx]

Agile is great when the maximum cost of system failure is momentary decreased sales.

[erikpukinskis]

The baby analogy is pithy, but I don’t really see the comparison.

You don’t do your software development in increments smaller than a month? What does that mean, you spend two months just writing specs?

[trhway]

I'd hope that it takes more than 2 months for specs at Boeing. No, we don't write the specs that long, if any. I mean that would be so w-word. In our case while usually almost everybody is on the same page that legs should be attached lower and hands - higher, the actual attachment points and number of the legs, hands, etc. may be pretty fluid through the iterations, and especially the things like number and topology of digits or the shape, number and location of eyes and other sensors.

[ken]

Having worked at Boeing, I can tell you their specs take way longer than two months to write. That's a good thing.

What's the point of delivering this type of software piecemeal? A new airliner takes 10 years or so to produce. There's no value in shipping half an airplane.

[deevolution]

"Individuals and Interaction" over "Process and Tools" doesn't seem like a great idea when developing software that handles life or death scenarios. Boeing, being the finatialized zombie company that they are now though have probably run some economic analysis and determined the optomal time to test / cost of life ratio. They must have determined that the cost of adequately testing their software is waaaaay more expensive than losing an astronaut here and there or some plebian passengers.

[Lunatic666]

I have respect for the software developers who write code where human lives are at risk. I don't think I would sleep well if a bug of mine could create a catastrophic event like that. If I fuckup completely, the only thing lost is money.

[simonblack]

Every extra finance-guy in the team means an engineer gets squeezed out. Eventually, there aren't enough engineers to make the team effective. Eventually, there is a disaster because the finance-guys don't have the engineering smarts to recognise failure.