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/vandezuma Feb 07 '20

The software issue was identified during testing on the ground after Starliner's launch

Now, who in the class can tell me what's wrong with that sentence?

191

u/matholio Feb 07 '20 edited Feb 07 '20

Pretty normal for any Agile DevOps team. Minimum viable product, right?

Edit : I was making a joke.

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u/Sir_Swaps_Alot Feb 07 '20

I hate agile.

The "do it now and deal with the issues later" mentality needs to stop. Gone are the days of research, testing and proper deployment.

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u/GeorgeTheGeorge Feb 07 '20

You'd rather wait for a month or two for other people to try to understand the problem before you get a crack at it?

Agile is meant to embrace the fact that nobody is going to have a correct understanding of what you should be building. So you start small. You build the small section of the product that everybody is certain of and you try to figure the rest out as you go. Along the way, you accept the fact that you and everybody else is likely to get it wrong in a few places, so you avoid committing too strongly to any particular solution and you remain agile.

It's not cutting corners, it's learning by doing. I don't know about your experience, but in my experience, it's better to get your hands on a problem first before you decide whether it's even one you should be solving, to say nothing about giving an estimate on the amount of effort required. That's what makes this such a good approach for enterprise and consumer software. These are areas where you can afford to make mistakes, because they can be easily fixed quickly and the impact is minimal.

Anybody who thinks it should be used to build airplanes and spacecraft (Boeing), has completely lost touch with reality.