[laurent92]

> I learned multiple times. Everytime I understood less of it.

Isn’t that how to spot seniority? The junior says “I know ReactJS and SpringBoot!” The senior says: “I don’t know much…”

Unrelated, but that reminds me how my Masters Degree teachers touted the importance of their subject in their introduction course, all explaining the Ariane V explosion from a completely different angle:

- The measurements professor: “Ariane V crashed because engineers tripped themselves into different imperial/metric units, this is why Measurements & Precision is the most important topic!”

- The programming teacher: “They fit a long inside an integer and it looped to negative, which inverted the trajectory of Ariane V and triggered its destruction, this is why learning C properly is the core of your teaching this year.”

- The quality assurance teacher: “They didn’t check the contract of the component! This is why QA is the most important when creating big systems!”

- The management teacher: “It’s the story of two teams who designed two components with different assumptions, one team worked in imperial units and they didn’t communicate clearly about assumptions, that’s why management is the one topic you should really work on.”

They were all right. Or rather, they were all wrong: Everyone knows Ariane V exploded because the officer pushed a red button ;)

[speedgoose]

Actually the first flight of Ariane 5 exploded automatically when it started to fall apart, because the flight computer read an Ada exception as flight data and from this, it decided to turn as fast as possible.

They reused the launch code of Ariane 4 in Ariane 5, but Ariane 5 was much faster to take off. It was an overflow on the acceleration and bad testing because reading an Ada exception as flight data is not great.

We learn that at school in France many years later.

[WalterBright]

That's why proper engineering is to address all the causes, even if fixing just one of them would have prevented the accident.

You'll see this regularly in the series Aviation Disasters on TV. It has lessons for all engineering projects. I watch every episode :-)

[salawat]

>They were all right. Or rather, they were all wrong: Everyone knows Ariane V exploded because the officer pushed a red button ;)

...and this is why learning the value of drawing the boundaries and selecting stop points in the analysis of complex topics, and the employment of humor is a powerful rhetorical tool. This is why you composition is the most important topic this semester!

Sorry... Couldn't resist. <Queue the follow up psychology is the most important topic you'll learn this semester, followed by Biology, Social Psychology, Anthropology, all getting stucktrying to get in the door.

Also, what school teaches QA These days?

[laurent92]

> Also, what school teaches QA These days?

Interesting question! INSA Lyon in France, but that was in 2005, you could mock that the Old Continent does a lot of V-Cycle waterfall projects and had missed the Agile turn of 2001.

BUT learning how processes help is, instead, a very important step to judge what exactly we give up with Agile.

The irony is I went on creating software for requirements, and I can testify that all of the hardware industry does QA more diligently than ever!

[salawat]

That's because QA and Statistical Process Control were born out of manufacturing due to the high stakes with processes and tooling not being able to change on a dime like software does. I'm not surprised at all there.

Software Quality Assurance is much more... Spongey.

[di4na]

small point: the imperial vs metric is not an Arianne V thing but a Mars Climate Orbiter one ;)

[PaulHoule]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider