Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

[pp000166@interramp.com (Robert Munck)]

On Mon, 13 May 1996 07:27:37 +0000, Ken Garlington
<garlingtonke@lmtas.lmco.com> wrote:

>Robert Munck wrote:
>>... hardly anyone on the committee ... has come within a mile of developing
>> applications software for the DoD in the last decade.
>
>I believe Maretta Holden would be an exception to this rule, and based
>on personal experience, I don't think she'll have any trouble presenting
>the DoD contractor view of things!

Maretta was the main reason that I qualified my statement.  However,
knowing how the Boeing management structure works, I'd still be
inclined to bet that she hasn't been a designer, programmer, or first-
or second-level manager on a project developing production software
for the DoD for a very long time.  Heck, that's the standard thing
that happens to good people.

My plea is for people who actually know how projects work, not people
who read status reports, listen to briefings, read (and write)
scholarly academic papers, and more or less believe what they hear.


>Also, the committee has had inputs from DoD (which had inputs from DoD
>contractors), etc. so they are certainly not working in a vacuum.

That gave me a good laugh.  By the time status reports work their way
up the management chain from the people who know what the status
is, are "vetted" by Marketing, go to the PM office and up that
service's bureaucracy, have all possible problems and deficiencies
cleaned out, and go to DoD, a vacuum would be crowded with
information by comparison.

Remember, this is the community that, after discovering that
maintenance forms the great majority of their software costs,
declared that COTS software would be used whenever possible,
a strategy that obviously reduces initial acquisition costs at
the expense of greatly increased maintenance.

Bob Munck@acm.org