Same with systems. A small team of hackers can work wonders on certain problems with no methodology and some TDD, but imagine 1000 of those small teams, many of them now with below average programmers, all working toward a single vision, that now need to integrate their individual projects, some of which can only be tested once our twice ever due to cost.
Huge budget => massive feature creep => massive manpower => huge overhead, extremely difficult communication/sync => failure to meet deadlines.
[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost
Either terraforming mars or we might make it to Alpha Centauri by the next century.
> In 2009, NASA held a symposium on project costs which presented an estimate of the Apollo program costs in 2005 dollars as roughly $170 billion.
"Unlike previous aircraft, such as the F-22, all software for the F-35 is written in C++ for faster code development."
Seems that C++ is fulfilling its intended purpose nicely: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all
Or perhaps Bjarne's real goal was to end all wars ;)
Edit: Oh, and it seems somebody has not read The Mythical Man Month:
"Because of this delay and the increased complexity of the jet's third and final software block, Lockheed Martin and the Defense Department have added additional resources to fielding Block III software"
Source - http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...
I'm sure that was a great comfort to the pilots in the F-22s.
They are unlucky - there is no better alternative in writing this kind of software than Ada [well, there is SPARK but it is subset of Ada with annotations].
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...
* 1986 F-16 Inversion when flying over the equator - Flying the F-16 in simulation over the equator, the computer got confused and instantly flipped the plane over, killing the pilot [in simulation]. And since it can fly forever upside down, it would do so until it ran out of fuel. Note: some claim this is a myth and to my knowledge, it has never been verified, but I tend to believe it could have happened. Source - http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.44.html
* 2007 F-22 Complete systems failure over International Date Line - At the international date line, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were—they could have been in real trouble. They were with their fuel tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii by visual, line of sight flight. Source - http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...
Its not at all far fetched to assume if the plane suddenly rolled at its maximum rate that it would pull the pilot's spine apart.
Should have been a skunk-works project kept under wraps until as late as possible, a la the F-16...and even that project didn't survive without a little bloat.
Like some others have said, drones are probably the equivalent rebel project that the F-16 was back in its day...
What people will do to spend more money in order to maintain an image of technical superiority.
It wasn't until it became apparent that the YF-16 was the real deal and probably going to be successful that it was finally exposed to the Pentagon procurement process, where it started to put on the pounds, and lost a bit of the agility that made the prototype aircraft famous (i.e. it had delta kinetic energy moves that the F-22 and F-35 can only accomplish via thrust vectoring).
> "We're gonna find things that we didn't know about and are gonna have to deal with them, but at least this scheduleis laid out to accommodate unexpected problems."
Bullshit- they played schedule chicken and got caught. It'll happen again.
It doesn't take a technical person to figure it out. I have seen history professors with more sense than the generals here. In another hundred years, i suppose our entire defence budget will be enough to afford one fighter jet, which can be shared between the air force and the navy 3 days a week each, with the Marine Corps getting Sundays....
Yeah. And it's not just software either, the Osprey had very similar issues with its planning and handling.
1. If you think you're 90 to 120 days behind schedule, you really have no idea how far you're behind schedule.
2. Somebody forgot Brook's law.
And... "ready to go to war by 2015"... guys, seriously... what war will it be? Is it an old one that is still going or an entirely new one that needs to be created to pay for this plane?
Sorry. Just ranting. No replies required.
We had a similar project over here in Europe (Eurofighter). So far they have been used to annoy Argentina purely through penis-waving and drop a couple of bombs on Libya and that's all. Then they ran out of spare bits and grounded them all.
This is a little interesting for me: I worked for Admiral David Venlet's brother, Rear Admiral Doug Venlet, back when he was the skipper of the USS Wadsworth. He was a very cool cat. Went on to carry "the football" for GW. Politics aside, that is a very unique job in the world. Two admirals out of one family. What was dinner like at that table?
Long before software.
Adding more people to a delayed software project, now where did I hear that before?
