>
> Unless you have unlimited funds and no deadlines, DO NOT follow the Space 
> Shuttle's team approach. They spend 99% of their time on bureaucracy, and 1% 
> on writing code. I believe the first time someone referenced this article, I 
> did a calculation on the cost in $ per line of code, and it was 
> astronomical*.
>
> Vitaliy
>
> *Which makes sense: after all, they work for NASA... 
>   
and the article is a little skewed when it mentions that a commercial 
piece of software of the same size would have 5000 errors in it.  If 
there are 420,000 lines of code, that's an error every 84 lines for 
commercial code.  Can you imagine how much sleep you'ld get if you 
thought your software that made it to production had total_lines/84 
errors in it?  I can imagine telling my customers that "in order for 
your application to be bug free", I'm going to need to hire 10 more 
programmers full-time to maintain your 10,000 lines of code.  You don't 
mind an extra $1M per year to support a product that grosses $0.5M per 
year do you?  Or imagine getting them to maintain this contract even 
after there has been a bug discovered (and consistently discovered year 
after year as the article mentions albeit at a slower pace).  I 
especially like the guy that leaves to the real world and comes back 
complaining that the customer is always wrong.  Don't get me wrong, I'm 
glad there are guys with this mentality working on things that could 
easily screw up and kill someone, but I wouldn't do it.  I'd be the guy 
on the launch pad trying to see if I could rig the system to a 16 bit 
processor to make it simpler so that I could control the whole thing 
with an RC airplane remote.  Hey guys, what happens if we just forget 
about all this timing crap and just try to react to real world inputs to 
make the system stable.  We'll start by sending a 1/10 scale model to 
the moon at 1/100 the cost, and when we've done that till we're sick of 
it, we'll start scaling up.  Now, where's my diet Dr. Pepper.  Somebody 
order a pizza, it's going to be a long night.

Tony




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