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by mangler
5003 days ago
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Yeah, not a big waterfall (or agile, or any other pyramid scheme) fan myself, but this kind of bullshit did get a man on the Moon and then a mixture of them got some kit on Mars, and generally they are doing OK. Some of them can actually scan you or your friend's internal organs to see if they're alright too - that's not going to be php on a lamp stack. I'm guessing they are probably not moving fast and breaking things either. They may be taking it easy with your friends internal organs, just so they don't get sued by the growing legal community on HN. There's also all that bizarre software that somehow delivers you to the airport of your choice. I wonder how that happens - do they have their Agile/Waterfall/Kanban/Nonsense boards on their office walls in order to get you there? |
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Agreed on the pyramid scheme. But the challenges listed strike me as mostly hardware, physics, and non-software science/engineering related. A Waterfall-like process is probably a good fit here since failure is far more costly than project budget/time overruns. Also, didn't the Apollo guidance computer suffer several failures? ;)
To me, software looks like the least-difficult part of the space program. Doesn't mean it's easy. But let's not overstate its importance.
Also, most developers aren't working on mission-critical stuff. I think it's fair to apply the 80/20 rule here.
> Some of them can actually scan you or your friend's internal organs to see if they're alright too - that's not going to be php on a lamp stack. I'm guessing they are probably not moving fast and breaking things either.
Funny you should bring up medical equipment. Recently, a laser caught fire inside a friend-of-a-friend during a bronchoscopy. Had to put him in an induced coma (Happy ending: he pulled through).
Just out of curiosity, does anyone here think there's anything inherit to either mainstream process (Agile, Waterfall) that puts direct controls in place to prevent complexity? Both talk about "Managing complexity" but very little on mitigating complexity. To me and prevention and elimination complexity is something our profession still struggles with.