Live data from Hacker News

Collins Aerospace: Sending text messages to the cockpit with test:test

ccc.de

31–36 of 36 posts

Re: Collins Aerospace: Sending text messages to the cockpit with test:test

#31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who else is using formal methods or safety critical stacks like ADA/Spark? This is not actually as common as many people seem to believe. The mandate died almost two decades ago. DOD aircraft fly on Fortran, JOVIAL, C, and C++ more than Ada. And DOD IT systems are a clusterfuck. > It's one of the few sectors that still plan software upfront waterfall style That's not the good thing you seem to think it is. Also, wh…

Pedantics aside, not much reasoning against quality. Perhaps I've lucked out, but I've worked in many sectors and do not at all agree with sentiment here about DOD software quality. There is significant formal investment/research in DOD to improve operations, including taking the best of practices in commercial. In my experience, the worst of software is written by teams with little experience improvising under Agile…

Can you point to a successful Waterfall project? A multi-million or billion dollar, 3+ year software development effort where a team figured out all the requirements correctly before writing a single line of code. Where they wrote every line of code correctly before testing it. And where testing was so spectacularly successful that they didn't have to go back and renegotiate the project requirements or dates to get extensions or reduced project scope.

If you can do this, then I might believe you about Waterfall being the best approach out there.

Right now your counter example is "teams with little experience" which is not much of an argument. Teams with little experience fail all the time, because they are inexperienced. Give them a $100 million Waterfall project to plan and execute over 3+ years and their failure would be even more spectacular.

Re: Collins Aerospace: Sending text messages to the cockpit with test:test

#33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL

You know, maybe you're right. It's possible that entire comment was meant as a joke. Poe's Law strikes again?

As someone who lives the DoD software delivery process on a day-to-day basis, it's too on the nose to not be satire. Everything is _exactly_ wrong, even the waterfall part (everything's "agile" now!).

Edit: Never mind! I just saw their other comment and it seems more like they are blissfully ignorant of the reality on the ground.

Re: Collins Aerospace: Sending text messages to the cockpit with test:test

#35
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who else is using formal methods or safety critical stacks like ADA/Spark? This is not actually as common as many people seem to believe. The mandate died almost two decades ago. DOD aircraft fly on Fortran, JOVIAL, C, and C++ more than Ada. And DOD IT systems are a clusterfuck. > It's one of the few sectors that still plan software upfront waterfall style That's not the good thing you seem to think it is. Also, wh…

Pedantics aside, not much reasoning against quality. Perhaps I've lucked out, but I've worked in many sectors and do not at all agree with sentiment here about DOD software quality. There is significant formal investment/research in DOD to improve operations, including taking the best of practices in commercial. In my experience, the worst of software is written by teams with little experience improvising under Agile…

I just attended a DoD "Scrum of Scrums" meeting.

> In my experience, the worst of software is written by teams with little experience improvising under Agile and taking on tech debt with no time/resources to get things done the right way.

Sounds like every DoD software project I've worked on for the past 5 years.

Re: Collins Aerospace: Sending text messages to the cockpit with test:test

#36
post #21

Collins Aerospace, the same company responsible days of outages at airport check-in kiosks https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3drpgv33pxo

They were also involved in the Boeing MCAS thing as the company responsible for the computers and who presumably wrote the code.
Post reply on HN