Iced up Cirrus crashes

"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

"Steve.T" wrote in message
oups.com...
Jon:

Who granted your "engineer" status? I certainly hope it wasn't the NJ
Cosmatology Board.

There are no Software Engineers that I'm aware of, only a title for a
position, but no engineers. This is a legal thing, and why I ask,
because I also do software and have for years.

Quite so! Using the title "Engineer" is granted by a state license and I
know of no states that grant a "Software Engineer" license. I work with
dozens of civil and other (real...licensed) engineers and each one has a
certificate or two on their wall. Many are incensesd by programmers using
the term and many are just amused given the haphazard way most software is
developed.

Yes, and we all know that having a government-issued license is such a
strong indicator of quality. Licensing is what happens when an industry
matures and transitions from an entrepreneurial to a guild mindset. Did John
Augustus Roebling have a license?

Having led many software projects, I will tell you that the "engineers" are
usually the ones most incensed by taking shortcuts in quality. The fact is
that the market has traditionally rewarded those who got to market first
with the most features rather than those who made the least buggy software.
It costs a *lot* to build very high-quality software. If the market would
tolerate buildings that collapsed 10% of the time but cost 90% less to
build, we'd see buildings falling down as often as Windows crashes.

-cwk.

"Colin W Kingsbury" wrote in message
ink.net...

Quite so! Using the title "Engineer" is granted by a state license and I
know of no states that grant a "Software Engineer" license. I work with
dozens of civil and other (real...licensed) engineers and each one has a
certificate or two on their wall. Many are incensesd by programmers
using
the term and many are just amused given the haphazard way most software
is
developed.

Yes, and we all know that having a government-issued license is such a
strong indicator of quality.

Non-sequitur.

Licensing is what happens when an industry
matures and transitions from an entrepreneurial to a guild mindset.

It's also what happens, hopefully, when the software industry matures from
bedroom hackers with very light complexity to CMM processes and high levels
of complexity.

Did John
Augustus Roebling have a license?

Nope and neither did the guys who designed and built the Tacoma Narrows
Bridge IIRC. ANd neither did the guys who built the pyramids.

Having led many software projects, I will tell you that the "engineers"
are
usually the ones most incensed by taking shortcuts in quality. The fact is
that the market has traditionally rewarded those who got to market first
with the most features rather than those who made the least buggy
software.

If Windows crashs while surfing the net, it's annoying. When a building or a
bridge collapses, or an ariplane crashes due to mechanical failure, people
die. Think of the WTC and how long the towers stood after taking hits from
fuel laden airplanes.

It costs a *lot* to build very high-quality software. If the market would
tolerate buildings that collapsed 10% of the time but cost 90% less to
build, we'd see buildings falling down as often as Windows crashes.

And the long range costs of software done haphazzardly is...what?


--
Matt
---------------------
Matthew W. Barrow, CE
Site-Fill Homes, LLC.
Montrose, CO

Ok, I kinda helped open this box. So let me address a few things so
that interested parties might have some understanding. Otherwise, skip
to the end ("=====") of this posting for some Cirrus related questions.

In the "mainframe" world I'm from, software vendors know they can't get
away with disclaimers that make them exempt from civil suit when their
software doesn't work for the intended purpose. Most all system level
software in the mainframe arena is "certified" to run on a certain
level of an O/S, has lots of regression tests (suites), and validation
testing. Fail a test, you don't make the GA date (that's General
Availability). And before GA there is generally at least one round of
"field" or Beta testing -- where there are specific environmental
considerations done in accepting entities into the tests.

Move up from there to the applications software and things may not be
done so rigorously. But one application can't get into conflict with
another such that the computer system is unstable. If that happens,
then the O/S vendor will be very interested in how an application made
the system unstable.

This type of programming does not accept "memory leaks" that force you
into IPLing (that's a reboot to you PC, MAC, and *nix types). Your
system "leaks" memory and when you hit the max allowed your address
space, the O/S begins the kill process. Only if you have good error
recovery will you avoid MEMTERM.

[I guess for those of you in computers you now know I do "MVS" stuff.]

This is why mainframes run and run and run. This is why mainframe
software costs so much and takes so long to develop. It is done to much
higher standards than most PC software is written.

This is why I'm a bit sensitive to the Software Engineer title - given
too easily to people who are clueless as to architectures and
rationales.

=========

Now back to A/C. What we have is a change in production matterial. This
included a change in designs from other similarly grouped A/C. So now
we have a very slick A/C with glass avionics. Does this require a new
kind of thinking in training?

Or, is the standard of a ballistic parachute causing people to make bad
decisions? If I know that I have an emergency handle I can pull to
magically get me out of trouble, will I fly the A/C beyond my
abilities? Will this thinking put me into the position of thinking that
even if I get disoriented, and have an unusual attitude, that I can
pull the handle and I'm saved?

If I don't recognize that I'm gonna pass the Vne, and I do pass it and
then pull the magic handle, is this what causes the plane to break into
pieces?

I'm asking these questions because I fly a 180HP 4 place plane that
does not have much for anti-icing. Were I to move to a Cirrus with the
weaping wing and parachute and speed and... would I start flying into
stuff I have no business flying into? I know that I've gotten into ice
once and that was after planning so that my IFR climbout would not take
me through ice.

So back to the question I asked earlier, at this time, has Cirrus
produced the new lawyer/doctor killer? Will the insurance companies
demand what is in effect a type rating when moving from steam gauges to
glass? Will they also demand the same for moving to composite type A/C?

Will this be a bad thing, or will it force people to think more about
what they are attempting to do with a nice capable machine?

Later,
Steve.T
PP ASEL/Instrument

"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

"Colin W Kingsbury" wrote in message
ink.net...



And the long range costs of software done haphazzardly is...what?


Much cheaper products and faster evolution in terms of features. Perhaps the
most famed software development outfit in the business (in terms of quality)
is the Lockmar group that built and maintains the guidance control program
on the Space Shuttle. They know of a small number (5 IIRC) bugs that cannot
be fixed without causing worse problems elsewhere.

Among other things, the computer this program runs on has not changed much
in 20 years- it is basically comparable to an Apple II in terms of
processing power. Second, five or so years ago they did a little accounting
and figured that over the years, the system had cost about $35,000 per line
of code. Now, Windows XP is up into the tens of millions of code by itself,
and MS Office is perhaps twice again as large. Do the math and you see we're
talking numbers into the hundreds of billions. So perfection (or as close to
it as is possible) would cost something like the size of the budget deficit.

While individual users have very little power over a company like MSFT, they
do in fact listen to their big enterprise customers like say Bank of America
who buy licenses tens of thousands at a time. For years, quality was not an
issue because the cost of failures (system crashes) was relatively low. But
this is starting to change because of awareness about security issues, among
other things. A large number of the security flaws that exist in Windows are
symptomatic of slapdash engineering. A virus that takes ten thousand
desktops down costs the BofA probably millions of dollars. So now these CIOs
are telling MSFT that they need to get their act together.

-cwk.

I must politely disagree. And this is very much off topic to this N/G.

I have worked on very large projects (including a tracking system for
NASA). When QA is part of the planning process (that is, a group is
responsible for validation, certification and regression testing),
things are done a bit differently.

When automation is used to test the system being built, testing and the
results come back very quickly. Debugging done by the developers is
more efficient than when it is expected of the support people. The cost
of debugged lines of code drops.

One other thing about software development - high level language coding
vs. assembly language ("machine language") coding. The development
costs are quite high for assembly language, particularly when they have
to work right the first time. But when that development can be done in
high-level languages that have been debugged, cost of development drops
when compared to "machine language" development.

So when software development is controlled and driven by the marketing
arm of a company, too often you get buggy code that has not been
correctly documented. [I've worked under those conditions too.]

Regards,
Steve.T
PP ASEL/Instrument

"Steve.T" wrote in message
ups.com...
I must politely disagree. And this is very much off topic to this N/G.

Since when has that stopped anyone?

So when software development is controlled and driven by the marketing
arm of a company, too often you get buggy code that has not been
correctly documented. [I've worked under those conditions too.]


Well, you'll sooner have cats and dogs living together than marketing and
engineering getting along. I've lived on both sides of the aisle and as a
now general manager I can say unequivocally that software development
*should* be driven by marketing. If they are doing their job right, they
understand what will sell and that is the point.

Looking at this from a product management standpoint, it is all about how
much priority you assign to building quality versus building other aspects
of the product. There is no free lunch: quality costs time. It may pay
itself back over the long run but companies often live and die financially
in the short one, so choices must be made. I have worked at two companies
that over-engineered their products and died as a result.

The real failure here is that consumers have no good way to get a handle on
the quality of products they're considering buying. This is especially acute
with typical business systems that are not mass-marketed. There is no JD
Power/Consumer Reports survey for software like there are for new cars. So
even if a customer says, "I'm willing to pay 10% more for a 5% improvement
in quality," there's no way for them to find out who is in fact better.
Vendors therefore have little incentive to do better than anyone else. New
features on the other hand will logically be prioritized over quality
improvements in many cases because while no customer will pay 10% more for a
quality improvement that can't be measured, they will pay 15% more for a
catchy feature that is quite obvious. We can argue the details but the
purpose of a business is in the end to make a product customers are willing
to pay for. Traditionally quality has not been rewarded by the market.

As an economist, I see this as a classic market failure known as the
"prisoner's dilemma." Because of the lack of information (difficulty of
measuring relative quality objectively), the market fails to provide
higher-quality options even though customers clearly want them. This
coincidentally is the branch of game theory that won John Nash (the subject
of "A Beautiful Mind") his Nobel some years back.

-cwk.