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.

That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up.

Ted Keller, 48, the group's senior technical manager, looks and sounds like the headmaster of a small private high school. It's Keller's job to make sure the software gets delivered on time, with all its capabilities, without regard to turf battles. He's a compact, bald man, a little officious and persnickety, qualities any astronaut would find reassuring. He has a gentle, geeky sense of humor, not so much with outsiders, but with his crowd.

It comes out in a meeting between members of the software group and their NASA counterparts. It's held in a small conference room overstuffed with 22 people and an overhead projector. Several times, from the back of the room, Keller issues a wry remark about the speed of code delivery, or the detail of some specifications, and the room lightens with laughter.

Otherwise, the hour-long meeting is sober and revealing, a brief window on the culture. For one thing, 12 of the 22 people in the room are women, many of them senior managers or senior technical staff. The on-board shuttle group, with its stability and professionalism, seems particularly appealing to women programmers.

For another, it's an exercise in order, detail, and methodical reiteration. The meeting is a classic NASA performance -- a rehearsal for an almost identical meeting several weeks away. It consists of walking through an enormous packet of data and view -- graphs which describe the progress and status of the software line by line. Except for Keller's occasional asides, the tone is businesslike, almost formal, the view - graphs flashing past as quickly as they can be read, a blur of acronyms, graphs, and charts.

What's going on here is the kind of nuts-and-bolts work that defines the drive for group perfection -- a drive that is aggressively intolerant of ego-driven hotshots. In the shuttle group's culture, there are no superstar programmers. The whole approach to developing software is intentionally designed not to rely on any particular person.

And the culture is equally intolerant of creativity, the individual coding flourishes and styles that are the signature of the all-night software world. "People ask, doesn't this process stifle creativity? You have to do exactly what the manual says, and you've got someone looking over your shoulder," says Keller. "The answer is, yes, the process does stifle creativity."

And that is precisely the point -- you can't have people freelancing their way through software code that flies a spaceship, and then, with peoples lives depending on it, try to patch it once its in orbit. "Houston, we have a problem," may make for a good movie; it's no way to write software. "People have to channel their creativity into changing the process," says Keller, "not changing the software."

The tight strictures the group practices can make the siren song of the rock n roll software world hard to resist. Quinn Larson, 34, had worked on shuttle software for seven years when he left last January to go to work for Micron Technology in Boise, Idaho, automating the manufacture of Microns memory chips.

At Micron, Larson was given the task to automate the saws that cut finished chip wafers to the right size. Screw up the program, you destroy the valuable wafers.

"It was up to me to decide what to do," says Larson. "There were no meetings, there was no record-keeping." He had freedom; it was a real kick. But to Larson's way of thinking, the culture didn't focus on, well, the right stuff. "Speed there was the biggest thing," he says. "The engineers would say, these are our top priorities, and we need to get'em as fast as we can." But the impression Larson got was that engineers didn't seem too concerned about how well the finished software actually worked. "Basically, they wanted quick software -- just put it out the door."

Larson started back at the shuttle group in mid-August. "The people here are just of the highest caliber," he said on his first day back in Clear Lake.

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

Recent Comments | 109 Total

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