How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer

[RCdancer]

Outstanding article on the challenges for software developers as systems become more complex. (Certainly applies to DJI as well.)

“As a lifetime member of the software development fraternity, I don’t know what toxic combination of inexperience, hubris, or lack of cultural understanding led to this mistake …… The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far out of their league and did not know it ..... I believe the relative ease—not to mention the lack of tangible cost—of software updates has created a cultural laziness within the software engineering community. Moreover, because more and more of the hardware that we create is monitored and controlled by software, that cultural laziness is now creeping into hardware engineering—like building airliners. Less thought is now given to getting a design correct and simple up front because it’s so easy to fix what you didn’t get right later."

How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer

Design shortcuts meant to make a new plane seem like an old, familiar one are to blame

spectrum.ieee.org

 

[RayOZ]

As a software engineer, I see this a lot in various industries. Some clients trying to save $$$ changing hardware design or use cheap hardware, and think writing 'magic' code would compensate for it. And there's plenty of software engineers that don't properly test their code, or add any documentation to their work.

 

[¬Nomad]

Personally I think Aeroplanes (excepting highly manouverable Fighters) should be designed with inherent stability and not have to rely on software to tame a bad design that only got through the system because there was big profit in doing so and Boeing was allowed a degree of self regulation

This aircraft should never have been certified (IMO)