Re: Boeing and Dreamliner

[aek@vib.usr.pu.ru (Alexander Kopilovitch)]

Hyman Rosen wrote:

>The investigation board thought that the <context> was inadequately
>documented, so that the reusers did not realize that the <context> was
>present.

Interesting turn. Let me recall your own quotaion from the report (from your
posting 23.06.2003 12:00:28 PST) :

     "No reference to justification of this decision
      was found directly in the source code. Given the
      large amount of documentation associated with any
      industrial application, the assumption, although
      agreed, was essentially obscured, though not
      deliberately, from any external review."

So, the report says that the assumption was essentially obscured because of
large amount of documentation, This means that the assumption *was* documented,
I think. Do you think otherwise?

So, if we agree that the assumption *was* documented then the problem moves
to another area - organization of the documentation for the whole system.
Also, don't you think that there is something wrong in organization when
the source code has to be explored in a search for justification of some
decision, and at the same time a present one cannot be find in documentation
because of "large amount" of the latter? Should we consider source code as
documenation for documentation?

>That's the Y2K problem in a nutshell. It's not just that two-digit years
>were used, it's that no one remembered *where* they were used.

That was in Y2K, right. But there was nothing similar in Ariane 5 case: they
did not expect any problems with reuse of SRI software. If they suspected
anything like that, there was no obstacles for identifying and locating the
problem.



Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia