What the F-86 can teach us about software development
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What the F-86 can teach us about software development
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Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#2This reminds me of a programming assignment from college to write a chess bot.
My partner and I tweaked it's understanding of how to evaluate board positions to eek out better playing ability, but the major improvements came from implementing a more efficient specialized game tree that let us calculate another move ahead every decision.
Having one more "loop" made a huge difference against our opponents; being simply smarter or better at any of the "steps in the loop" didn't help nearly as much.
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#3>>Boyd realized the key advantage of the F-86 was that it’s flight controls were mechanically assisted.
I am guesssing what that means is it's the tools and not the process. The process is subconscious. The tools that we use, determine how fast we can iterate. Take RoR for example, or Visual Basic(F5 anyone?), developers could iterate rapidly and after a while the process faded away, but the tools remained. Maybe, developers need to play with new toys instead of following new processes.
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#4What a disappointing conclusion to an interesting historial blurb. American shot down lots of Russians because we had fly by wire planes. So Pair programming and stand up meetings are the obvious conclusion.
What a joke.
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#5See "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" for a more complete description of his life. The article doesn't do it justice.
http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316...
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#6What a disappointing conclusion to an interesting historial blurb. American shot down lots of Russians because we had fly by wire planes. So Pair programming and stand up meetings are the obvious conclusion. What a joke.
I had the same reaction. It felt like a sneaky publicity for Agile. On the other hand, the writer found one hell of a nice hook to get people to read the article.
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#7In addition to the tenuous link between the two activities, the 10 to 1 ratio is almost certainly untrue.
Details here (in the main text and in cited materials):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-86_Sabre#Korean_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiG-15#Operational_history
Isolating success in dogfights to flight controls seems like a gross oversimplification. I would like to see the original source for this (attributed to Boyd in the article).
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#8Totally tangential but when I was a kid (in the 80s) there was a school/park somewhere in So Cal (I think) that had an actual F-86 on its playground (gutted of course). Whenever we road tripped on the weekend my parents would climb stop there and I'd climb up on it.
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#9Slight nit.
>but because their arms didn’t tire as quickly from operating the flight controls
While tiring would be a factor, even if completely fresh, you can simply move a lesser weight (force) faster than a larger one.
Second problem is that there were multiple differences between MiGs and Sabres - the one I always heard was most significant, back when I was a teen, is that Sabres were better constructed, MiGs were more likely to fall apart from relatively light damage. So don't take any single article or viewpoint as the truth - reality is always more complex than will fit into a article or book.
Re: What the F-86 can teach us about software development
#10Slight nit. >but because their arms didn’t tire as quickly from operating the flight controls While tiring would be a factor, even if completely fresh, you can simply move a lesser weight (force) faster than a larger one. Second problem is that there were multiple differences between MiGs and Sabres - the one I always heard was most significant, back when I was a teen, is that Sabres were better constructed, MiGs wer…
Another important difference that went along with Boyd's thesis is that the Sabres had less obstructed canopies, letting the pilot see around themselves more easily.