[DanielBMarkham]

They are being held accountable. The press prints a story, you get all angry, hopefully you vote somebody into office, then they create new rules, and in ten or twenty years we can start making generalizations about how well those rules are working (or not).

How else would you do it? Public executions of any public-funded program that looks bad? We have an accountability system -- it just might not be designed to optimize the things we would like for it to optimize.

[curlyquote]

Why not have the federal government have an actual organization of software developers (with possibly a standards committee) that do it themselves instead of contracting it out to private companies?

Something like a NASA for non-space software development?

[DanielBMarkham]

It used to be that I would look at something like this and pronounce judgment. As I get older, however, I've learned that trying things is always good. See what happens!

My question would simply be: how would this be any different than using a small contractor? Or having really great people in a small team do the same thing?

In other words, what does a new organization and standards bring to the table that's not already there? Simply a new name? What do they do that you currently cannot do separately if you wanted to? Are you really suggesting something new, or just adding a bunch of buzzwords together in an effort to try to make something sound good? Or, to be even more provocative, is the goal here to actually do something, or create something that sounds like it might do something? Because they're two different things. We've been down this road of "Ok, let's set aside this special group, with these special criteria, and a new name" a hundred times. Best case -- it works at a very small scale. Worst case, same old, same old, just with new titles over all the stuff.

[mcguire]

You do realize that NASA contracts everything out to private companies? All of the NASA employees I know are either project or program management (the two sides of the contracting coin).

[hga]

From an obit, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05...

Walter Schirra; Fifth Astronaut in Space

By Patricia Sullivan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Walter M. Schirra Jr., 84, one of the original seven astronauts and the only man to fly in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs....

[...]

[His second] mission was delayed a second time when the Titan II engines beneath the space capsule ignited at countdown and then shut down.

For several heart-stopping minutes, Capt. Schirra and astronaut Tom Stafford, sitting atop a highly explosive mass of rocket fuel, chose not to pull the ejection handle, which would have scrapped the mission. It was a calculated risk. Capt. Schirra trusted that the booster rocket would not explode and that the first attempt to rendezvous with another spacecraft, Gemini 7, could still occur. The risk paid off, and three days later, the launch was successful.

Asked later what he thought while sitting on the launchpad, Capt. Schirra replied, "This was all put together by the lowest bidder."

E.g. the story of the reasearch and developemtn of the legendary Apollo Saturn V first stage engines by Rocketdyne, first for the Air Force and then for NASA, is also legendary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-1_(rocket_engine)#History. They used explosives to debug it! That's got to count as a hack....