Who codes for the space shuttle?
Fast Company had an interesting piece about coding for the space shuttle with the Lockheed Martin Corps space mission systems division; a fascinating look into the absolutely boring task of writing 99.9% perfect software. Maybe Microsoft’s profits wouldn’t be so fat this quarter if they’d spent more dollars per line time slimming down on bugs but hey, Vista ain’t the shuttle, and when my PC explodes, nobody dies but my inner child. Did I mention my primary-secondary laptop, a Vaio FS, randomly dies booting Windows as of earlier this week? I hadn’t touched it for a few days, and now it’s just dead. Kinda makes you wonder if there are any Software Engineering Institute Level 5-rated departments operating in the company that makes the operating system running on some 80-90% of the computers in the world.
PS -I should specify — particularly to all the annoyed Digg users who found there way to this post — it’s blue-screening on startup, the hardware’s just fine. I was just making a point; I do happen to know a bit about hardware.
Co-founder of 
Interesting. Though 10 years old (TEN).
Wonder if anything has changed since then.
CMM level 5 (or whatever level) is no guarantee that your company delivers hig-quality bug-free SW. It’s just a guarantee (FWIW) that it will do it everytime the same again…
Ha, 10 years old it is indeed. Funny how it’s as relevant now as it ever was!
It certainly has moved on from 10 years ago. The idea that you build perfect software by producing ridiculously detailed design documentation before writing any code has thankfully been consigned to history. A better approach is to do a little design and then immediately validate it by writing code and rigourously testing it. It is a fallacy to think that you can produce perfect designs without testing them out.
[...] Fast Company has an interesting piece about coding for the space shuttle with the Lockheed Martin Corps space mission systems division; a fascinating look into the absolutely boring task of writing 99.9% perfect software.read more | digg story Links [...]
Thanks for posting this, I read it years ago but had lost the link. Funnily enough, we received an e-mail this morning saying that our “business uptime” had to increase from 98.7% to a target of 99.9%. I thought, “that’s fine, but you’ve got to be prepared to pay for it” and I thought of this article.
SEI or CMM Level 5 is too costly to implement for companies to make money from. When life isn’t on the line, there’s no need to go through all of the issues related in making an application SEI Level 5 adherent. The amount of process overhead is overwhelming…it’s not a trivial effort to move up from level to level.
it’s probably driver’s problem, windows code has nothing to do with it…
i write control software for industry, including safety systems (iec61511/508) and if you think you can’t define a system before you code it take a look at ISA88 – mind you, not everyone gets it.
when you are delivering a single copy of an app and it protects people, you design the code before you write it,then you test it in a specific way or you can end up in cou and then you