Jeffry Smith writes:
> Boeing
> jets are extremely complex, requiring hundreds of thousands, if not
> millions of parts, each of which must do its job correctly. The
> odds are that there are flaws in the jets. Yet, as recent actions
> involving the Boeing 737 show, Boeing is held legally and financially
> liable for the performance of their airplanes. The software industry
> argues that, with products of similar complexity, they CANNOT be held
> liable. Why?
Computer science is still a maturing field, and the technology
involved changes so rapidly that it's to stay on top of everything.
Combine this with a market that seems to favor "more features" and
"speed to the market" over "general stability", and, well, look
around, that's the situation we find ourselves in.
I write code for a living, and every day I strive to juggle the tasks
of implementing the features that the customer wants and making sure
that there are no bugs in the code. This is no easy task. I enjoy
the challenge though, so I keep on slugging away.
I love open-source software because it facilitates the whole idea of
peer-review, which I think is a critical part of good software
design. Every once in a while I find a bug in an open-source
project's code-base, and generally I can just go to the source, figure
out the problem, fix it, and send a patch to the packages
maintainers. I find this to be very empowering and I think that it
leads to better software.
I don't think that a lot of shops out there do a lot of peer-review,
and I believe that this tends to produce lower-quality software. I'd
bet a million dollars that Boeing's engineers do a lot of peer-review
when designing their airplanes. Because failure is not an option...
Writing good software is *hard*.
Want to see an example of a software group that produces solid code?
Read this article:
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.html
Now, to be fair, these people have a rather large budget and their
customer isn't really demanding a lot of new features. But the
article gives a flavor for how hard it is to get things right.
Now, all of this said, the path of destruction left over by the recent
worm only further confirms my belief that something is seriously wrong
over in Microsoft's software shop. I can't even believe that the
(mis-)features in Outlook that allowed the worm to work in the first
place ever made it through a design review. What were they thinking?
(contrast the mindset of the people who designed these "features" into
Outlook with the people at Sun who designed the Java applet security
model -- in one case we have responsible engineering, and in the other
case we have something that gives me a headache just thinking about it)
--kevin
--
Your choices are good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two.
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