'On Fri, 26 Jun 1998 04:46:47, webmaster@lucidimages.com wrote:> Mayday, Mayday
...
> The replacement, called the Advanced Automation System (AAS), combines all
> the challenges of computing in the 1990s. A program that is more than a
> million lines in size is destributed across hundreds of computers and
> embedded into new and sophisticated hardware,
A million lines *is* pretty big. The mega system that Shmuel and I
worked on in the 1980's, the one that was late and over budget but still
a huge success, was less than a million original lines. The final cost,
including the two mainframe computer centers was over a billion dollars.
>... And the FAA conservatively expected to pay about
> $500 per line of computer code, five times the industry average for
> well-managed development processes.
Fully burdened with the production computer centers, testing and
training, D2/D3, was over $1,000/line.
> That project is also spiralling down the drain. Now running about five years
> late and more than $1 billion over budget, the bug-infested program is being
> scoured by software experts at Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute
> of Technology to determine whether it can be salvaged or must be canceled
> outright. The reviewers are scheduled to make their report in September.
Bzzzzzt! Sorry, I don't think SEI and the academic types are experts.
These are people who derive their expertise from reading about mega
software engineering projects. Talking about how large code projects
are done isn't the same as doing large code projects. Thinking grand
thoughts about masses of software isn't the same as cranking out a
mass of software. There are very few people who have actually broken a
sweat on a mega software engineering project.
Even dragging in someone like Professor Brooks would be suspect. He was
at the top of the pyramid and very likely saw the project differently
from a mid-manager or a code-grunt.
I'm not saying that the mid-manager or the code-grunt has more to
contribute than a Brooks. They have a different perspective and if you
want to know what's really going on, you need all types. You might
include *one* CMU/MIT SEI'er for laughs
I'd love to get Shmuel, Secor, Infomagic, Oxler, and two or three other
c.s.y2k'ers on a team to rip the FAA project and put it back on track.
We could do it. ...and would it ever be fun, 14 hour days for a month,
the screaming matches, ...and that's at the breakfast buffet.
> Disaster will become an increasingly common and disruptive part of software
> development unless programming takes on more of the characteristics of an
> engineering discipline rooted firmly in science and mathematics.
> Fortunately, that trend has already begun. Over the past decade industry
> leaders have made significant progress toward understanding how to measure,
> consistently and quantitatively, the chaos of their development processes,
> the density of errors in their products and the stagnation of their
> programmers' productivity. Researchers are already taking the next step:
> finding practical, repeatable solutions to these problems.
I have no idea what the above paragraph is about.> > [Continued in Part 4]
> -------------------------------
____
'Subject: Re: Software's Chronic Crisis - Part 3
From: kiyoinc@ibm.XOUT.net (cory hamasaki)Date: 1998/06/26
Message-ID: <7kepWhCNP4qd-pn2-QNzMJUwgWCWG@localhost>
Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000[More Headers]
[Subscribe to comp.software.year-2000] |
