[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to

[Bob Koehler]

In article <17eh29-9t2.ln1 at news.sture.ch>, Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> writes:
> 
> There was at one time an excellent write up about the way software 
> development was done at NASA.  I'm pretty sure the link was posted here 
> on comp.os.vms but I have long since lost the reference, and Google 
> didn't help the last time I looked.  There's also the possibility that 
> the article is no longer on line, and that would be a shame.

   Software at NASA is developed according to site, project, branch,
   civil servant, and contractor whim.  Each of the higher levels tries 
   to impose standards on the lower levels.  Each of the lower levels
   tries to advise the higher levels.

   There have been some interesting discussions, such as how the flight
   software for the space shuttle was done, but at almost any level of
   detail there is no one way across such a large organization.

   I once had a competing contractor claim that his company had many
   thousands of programmers and they were all developing software
   following the same process.  I knew he was either a liar, a fool,
   or familiar with a process document that didn't say anything.