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At the on-board shuttle group, about one-third of the process of writing software happens before anyone writes a line of code. NASA and the Lockheed Martin group agree in the most minute detail about everything the new code is supposed to do -- and they commit that understanding to paper, with the kind of specificity and precision usually found in blueprints. Nothing in the specs is changed without agreement and understanding from both sides. And no coder changes a single line of code without specs carefully outlining the change.
If only our pre-coding process was a thousandth as rigorous...
Of course, it's also nice to not have to worry about budget. I do think that the focus on never repeating a mistake is particularly intelligent.
Many years ago, in engineering class, our professor pointed out that perfection is not only possible, but required in CPU design. Doing millions of operations per second - any flaw is 100% fatal.
It's a little surprising to me that the rigor in hardware design hasn't migrated (much) to software design, here twenty+ years later
excellent (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Dreaming big (Score:1)
At the on-board shuttle group, about one-third of the process of writing software happens before anyone writes a line of code. NASA and the Lockheed Martin group agree in the most minute detail about everything the new code is supposed to do -- and they commit that understanding to paper, with the kind of specificity and precision usually found in blueprints. Nothing in the specs is changed without agreement and understanding from both sides. And no coder changes a single line of code without specs carefully outlining the change.
If only our pre-coding process was a thousandth as rigorous...
It's nice to do it right (Score:2)
Many years ago, in engineering class, our professor pointed out that perfection is not only possible, but required in CPU design. Doing millions of operations per second - any flaw is 100% fatal.
It's a little surprising to me that the rigor in hardware design hasn't migrated (much) to software design, here twenty+ years later