They Write the Right Stuff

By: Charles FishmanTue Dec 18, 2007 at 5:42 PM

As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command.

Software is everything. (It also sucks.)

In the history of human technology, nothing has become as essential as fast as software.

Virtually everything -- from the international monetary system and major power plants to blenders and microwave ovens -- runs on software. In office buildings, the elevators, the lights, the water, the air conditioning are all controlled by software. In cars, the transmission, the ignition timing, the air bag, even the door locks are controlled by software. In most cities so are the traffic lights. Almost every written communication that's more complicated than a postcard depends on software; every phone conversation and every overnight package delivery requires it.

Software is everything. It also sucks.

"It's like pre-Sumerian civilization," says Brad Cox, who wrote the software for Steve Jobs NeXT computer and is a professor at George Mason University. "The way we build software is in the hunter-gatherer stage."

John Munson, a software engineer and professor of computer science at the University of Idaho, is not quite so generous. "Cave art," he says. "It's primitive. We supposedly teach computer science. There's no science here at all."

Software may power the post-industrial world, but the creation of software remains a pre-industrial trade. According to SEI's studies, nearly 70% of software organizations are stuck in the first two levels of SEI's scale of sophistication: chaos, and slightly better than chaos. The situation is so severe, a few software pioneers from companies such as Microsoft have broken away to teach the art of software creation (see "Drop and Code me Twenty!" )

Mark Paulk, a senior member of the SEI technical, says the success of software makes its weaknesses all the more dramatic. "We've developed software products that are enormously complex and enormously powerful. We're critically dependent on it," says Paulk. "Yet everyone complains how bad software is, with all the defects. If you bought a car with 5,000 defects, you'd be very upset."

In this software morass, the on-board shuttle group stands out as an exception. Ten years ago the shuttle group was considered world-class. Since then, it has cut its own error rate by 90%.

To be this good, the on-board shuttle group has to be very different -- the antithesis of the up-all-night, pizza-and-roller-hockey software coders who have captured the public imagination. To be this good, the on-board shuttle group has to be very ordinary -- indistinguishable from any focused, disciplined, and methodically managed creative enterprise.

In fact, the group offers a set of textbook lessons that applies equally to programmers, in particular, and producers, in general. A look at the culture they have built and the process they have perfected shows what software-writing must become if software is to realize its promise, and illustrates what almost any team-based operation can do to boost its performance to achieve near-perfect results.

Software for Grown-Ups

"Shipping hell continued today. Grind, grind, grind. We'll never make it. Have I said that already? Why do we always underestimate our shipping schedules? I just don't understand. In at 9:30 AM; out at 11:30 PM Dominos for dinner. And three diet Cokes."

No, it's not the on-board shuttle group. It's Douglas Coupland's "Microserf's," a true-to-life fictional account of life in the software-fast-lane. And it's the dominant image of the software development world: Gen-Xers sporting T-shirts and distracted looks, squeezing too much heroic code writing into too little time; rollerblades and mountain bikes tucked in corners; pizza boxes and Starbucks cups discarded in conference rooms; dueling tunes from Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Morrisette and the Fugees. Its the world made famous, romantic, even inevitable by stories out of Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Netscape.

It's not the story of the on-board shuttle group. Their quarters are a study in white-collar pedestrian. The most striking thing is how ordinary they look. Other than the occasional bit of shuttle memorabilia, you could be in the offices of any small company or government agency. Everyone has his or her own small office, and the offices have desks, PCs, and sparse personal artifacts. People wear moderately dressy clothes to work, neat but nothing flashy, certainly nothing grungy.

It's strictly an 8-to-5 kind of place -- there are late nights, but they're the exception. The programmers are intense, but low-key. Many of them have put in years of work either for IBM (which owned the shuttle group until 1994), or directly on the shuttle software. They're adults, with spouses and kids and lives beyond their remarkable software program.

From Issue 06 | December 1996

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Recent Comments | 109 Total

December 29, 2008 at 1:34pm by Tony BenBrahim

With all due respect to the author, $35 million per year to maintain a 420,000 line program is expensive. Most organizations and consumers are not willing to shoulder than kind of expense. And no, this kind of process is not standard in every engineering discipline. There are tradeoffs for example in automotive design, it is possible to design and build a car that never breaks down, but would anyone be able to afford it? Yes, there are more rigourous engineering processes when the stakes are high (airplanes, chemical plants, etc..), but they come with commensurate costs. For a consumer operating system or a word processor, or a corporate line of business application, faster and cheaper wins out very time over flawless and unaffordable.

They Write the Right Stuff

Software is everything. (It also sucks.)

Software for Grown-Ups

Recent Comments | 109 Total

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