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Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
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Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#12The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.
Anyone that has ever worked with outsourced developers knows the truth of this. If you give them a spec or requirements, they will do exactly what that thing says. Even including the typos or grammatical errors. I don’t blame them. They have no incentive to care beyond this type of business transaction. But applying this model to anything other than vaporware is terrifying.
> They have no incentive to care beyond this type of business transaction.
I don't know if it's even a matter of incentive. Even when we hire local developers from some particular cultures, it's not part of their culture to question "authority" or be independent thinkers. So, they too will do exactly what we ask because they trust us as the experts or think that we'll be displeased if they don't do precisely what we asked.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#13The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.
If so, this may be a good back-to-reality counter-example for all the over-zealous formal proof enthusiasts. There is an old paper from 70's by people who designed complex systems where they stress the point that even if your system was designed and formally checked and if it obeys all the known rules and specifications, it will still fail in real world unless you test and iterate it a lot. Because it is impossible to formally specify all possibilities that can happen, and noone can forecast all the desired specs before the thing is built and tested in real. One has to experiment/iterate to find the very specifications that are then going to be designed against. Which in 737Max case was seemingly neglected.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#14The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.
I understand what you mean but no tester/developer worth their salt should say or hide behind this. Sadly, too many do. The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain. And oh, no idea how Boeing missed it but some Indian companies are just not worth the bother. HCL, TCS, Cognizant, Infosys included. But hey, they're cheap!
Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#15The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.
If so, this may be a good back-to-reality counter-example for all the over-zealous formal proof enthusiasts. There is an old paper from 70's by people who designed complex systems where they stress the point that even if your system was designed and formally checked and if it obeys all the known rules and specifications, it will still fail in real world unless you test and iterate it a lot. Because it is impossible t…
> Because it is impossible to formally specify all possibilities that can happen, and noone can forecast all the desired specs before the thing is built and tested in real.
Is that so? Wouldn't it be in theory possible to verify it against our current understanding of all laws of physics and the corresponding equations?
Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
If so, this may be a good back-to-reality counter-example for all the over-zealous formal proof enthusiasts. There is an old paper from 70's by people who designed complex systems where they stress the point that even if your system was designed and formally checked and if it obeys all the known rules and specifications, it will still fail in real world unless you test and iterate it a lot. Because it is impossible t…
> Because it is impossible to formally specify all possibilities that can happen, and noone can forecast all the desired specs before the thing is built and tested in real. Is that so? Wouldn't it be in theory possible to verify it against our current understanding of all laws of physics and the corresponding equations?
It also has a user interface. Are you saying it's possible to formally quantify human behaviour as well?
Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#17People in the industry would instantly recognize that there are many layers to a big system and some are less critical than others. There is no proof here that the contractor touched any critical flight system software. But this is written for a general audience who are unable to tell the difference. The piece rides on the narrative that Boeing was careless, which may be true overall wrt 737MAX, but not necessarily i…
These planes run over $50 million each, and even a misprogrammed galley oven could potentially bring down a plane in flight. Given that, would you be happy that they outsourced any engineering in this way?
Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#18This is pure scapegoating. The "9$/hour" engineers wrote code exactly like Boeing asked them to. In other words, it's a mistake in the requirements given by Boeing designers and not the cheap engineers who wrote the code.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#19This is pure scapegoating. The "9$/hour" engineers wrote code exactly like Boeing asked them to. In other words, it's a mistake in the requirements given by Boeing designers and not the cheap engineers who wrote the code.
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Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
If so, this may be a good back-to-reality counter-example for all the over-zealous formal proof enthusiasts. There is an old paper from 70's by people who designed complex systems where they stress the point that even if your system was designed and formally checked and if it obeys all the known rules and specifications, it will still fail in real world unless you test and iterate it a lot. Because it is impossible t…
> Because it is impossible to formally specify all possibilities that can happen, and noone can forecast all the desired specs before the thing is built and tested in real. Is that so? Wouldn't it be in theory possible to verify it against our current understanding of all laws of physics and the corresponding equations?
You are forgetting nondeterministic aspects. Only in theory, aircraft and atmosphere is a deterministic Newtonian machine, in practice, less so. But even if so, physics simulations can't be done and evaluated for all possible initial conditions for even the simplest model.
One can imagine a mental model of airplane and make a formal design for it. Then do a formal check in the most important scenarios that introduce weather, human action, system failures. The design will always fail for some scenarios. Not a problem if those are not important (in terms of risk). But which scenarios are the important ones? Probability and severity of consequences of those scenarios are much needed knowledge, and one can find those only via the good old method of iterative testing in wild.