Software Engineering discussion

Peter's early computing experiences were similar to mine, and I enjoyed the nostalgic look back. I liked his description of testing at Google, which often non-binary assertions. He is anti-UML, which seems to be another theme with this bunch. His NASA experience sure gave him great background in mission-critical coding.

Yeah, my favorite part was about foot-pounds vs. newtons bug at NASA. It was interesting how bugs like that get their way in mission-critical software. I would think people at NASA take software integration tests more seriously, but I guess it’s like everywhere else; and now I’m wondering how many bugs they find during flight, not necessarily leading to catastrophic failures.

I would love to read more about mission-critical software development if anyone can suggest interesting sources.

Aleksander - NASA actually publishes quite a lot of content about their software engineering practices on their websites. Here is an example:

http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/rse/

They used to have even more resources a couple years ago. You can still come across some links from other websites (for example the former NASA Software Assurance Technology Center guidelines).

I was also given this link by a former professor that may be of interest to you:
http://www.rspa.com/spi/SQA.html#reliability

There are a lot of resources of varying quality and interest.

Peter - I also found Norvig's description of testing at Google interesting. I still have not completed the book though... I have been skipping around.

Thanks, Rhian! For some reason I was unable to open first link here at work, but will definitely check it out at home.

I just noticed that there is an extra space at the end of the URL! Try copy/pasting this one :)
http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/rse/