31–40 of 79 posts
It still blows my mind that a trillion dollars later no american has the courage to say "so our trillion dollar plane...it doesn't fly. US is miles ahead...someone have the courage to level.
> One solution favored by Winter during his recent tenure was so-called agile software development. His vision for “continuous capability development and delivery” resembles DevOps, a popular method in the private sector for quickly testing and evaluating features for new products. Coders generate software upgrades or patches in a matter of days or weeks, pass them along to users to test and then push out the update…
The author is an expert in defense, specifically warplanes. She's not an expert in software engineering.
https://hudmissingmoney.solari.com/the-real-game-of-missing-...
I read it a few months ago. Highly recommended.
> One solution favored by Winter during his recent tenure was so-called agile software development. His vision for “continuous capability development and delivery” resembles DevOps, a popular method in the private sector for quickly testing and evaluating features for new products. Coders generate software upgrades or patches in a matter of days or weeks, pass them along to users to test and then push out the update…
The comment you point out reminds me of something Margaret Hamilton said: Also, what became apparent with Apollo – though it is not how it worked – is that it is better to define your system up front to minimise errors, rather than producing a bunch of code that then has to be corrected with patches on patches. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-...
Indeed, it sometimes probably is, and agile generally shouldn't mean you just make it up as you go along. But I think we've generally come to recognize that, at least in many cases, being more flexible and iterative.
This, to be clear, is not in any way a knock on the many people who developed software for Apollo. It was a type of project and set of technologies that made it difficult to be as iterative as, certainly, pure software projects are today.
> There soon turned out to be an essential flaw in the grand plan for a single plane that could do everything. Design specifications demanded by one branch of the military would adversely impact the F-35’s performance in another area. “It turns out when you combine the requirements of the three services, what you end up with is the F-35, which is an aircraft that is in many ways suboptimal for what each of the servic…
I think the Navy and Air Force could have shared version with a lot in common. The Marines want VTOL and I understand that feature is important to the Marines. Unfortunately, the VTOL requirements have force compromises in the design. Without VTOL, I believe the Navy and Air Force would have ended up with a platform that was more acceptable then what they are getting.
> One solution favored by Winter during his recent tenure was so-called agile software development. His vision for “continuous capability development and delivery” resembles DevOps, a popular method in the private sector for quickly testing and evaluating features for new products. Coders generate software upgrades or patches in a matter of days or weeks, pass them along to users to test and then push out the update…
It stands to reason removing the human component would be a far better engineering choice than this monstrosity.
I’m reminded of the quote, “A flying car is equally bad at being a car and an aircraft.”
A really interesting biography which shows this is far from a new problem is Boyd: The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War. I read it a few months ago. Highly recommended.