Re: Boeing and Dreamliner

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Documentation may or may not be an issue. In the aerospace world in 
which I work, it would be considered *extremely* irresponsible to 
utilize a component without demonstrating through system testing that it 
operates throughout the intended flight envelope. Had they run the IRS 
through even a *minimal* test of the intended flight envelope, they 
would have discovered that it didn't work in the intended environment. 
The fact that this was not documented is a stalking horse used to divert 
attention away from the fact that they didn't do what they were supposed 
to do in the way of system testing. Lots of things in systems this 
complex are not documented. Lots of design decisions are left unnoted 
anywhere. You can't write them all down or you'd never get the job done. 
What *is* done is to run the unit under consideration through a formal 
qualification test that demonstrates it meets its requirements. This, 
they never did.

MDC



Hyman Rosen wrote:
> 
> But the original designers didn't leave any indication behind that the
> software they had written would fail in such a modified usage. That's
> not just my conclusion, that's the conclusion of the investigatory
> board. Had they documented the limits on trajectories, teh Ariane 5
> team would have known that the code needed to be re-examined.
> 
> Since when do Ada advocates favor testing over documentation?
> 


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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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