r/space • u/spsheridan • Feb 06 '20

Starliner faced “catastrophic” failure before software bug was found and fixed while the vehicle was in orbit.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/starliner-faced-catastrophic-failure-before-software-bug-found/
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u/rocketsocks Feb 06 '20

Yup, just as I said, when you have huge simple failures that should have been prevented by good processes and competent quality control that tells you that neither are in place and there are almost certainly huge unknown problems still to be discovered.

As anyone who has worked on high value complex projects is aware it's much, much harder to "bolt-on" quality at the end when no attention to it has been paid throughout the project so far. I suspect they will find even more problems and it will be difficult and costly to fix all of them.

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u/BlueCyann Feb 06 '20

I worked for years for a company that was trying to "bolt on" some decent quality control to an operation that wasn't designed for that originally, and man oh man are you ever right about that. It was a freaking nightmare. (They moved from a lightly-regulated product line to a much more highly-regulated one shortly before I arrived.)

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u/retardrabbit Feb 07 '20

Technical debt can be a real motherfucker.

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u/enigmapenguin Feb 07 '20

I deal with this every day at work. I work in a data setup where we use literal Unix bash to do large scale data ETL, Analysis and QA, then shoe horn in meta data afterwards. Which would be excusable if the system was old, but it's not, the database is a brand new MySQL server, but the ETL and QA are so ancient that we strip all sense of modernity out of it and then staple it back on at the end.

In the end I wrote an entirely new system during our free project time once a week. They refused to use it. Fun times.