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

[Paul Sture]

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:37:25 -0600, Bob Koehler wrote:

> 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.

The article I remember was about a specific project.  Apparently some 
left for much higher pay elsewhere but came back because they missed the 
teamwork, peer code reviews and so on.

>    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.

FWIW I've had similar feelings about claims by software companies in 
other fields.

-- 
Paul Sture