Warning: This blog is probably only mildly amusing. Its more sad than anything, and it will really only be interesting to engineers. You have been warned.
My boss relayed a just plain sad story to me today that about one of the military software application frameworks we are working with. Lets call the platform CRAP. Obviously, I've changed the name of the program to protect the incompetent.
Anyways, my boss was on a conference call the other day about the quality of the CRAP framework. The conversation went something like the following:
Air force: We've measured the mean time between failures of your CRAP framework at 11 hours. That is pretty low for a platform that we want to classify as mission critical.
CRAP developers (in smug voice): Actually, the Navy's F-(something or other) program has measured the mean time between failures as 108 hours.
Air Force: Yeah, but there definition of mean time between failures is not the same as ours.
CRAP developers: Really? How do they differ?
Navy: Yeah, the Air Force is right. Our definition does not classify the application crashing as a failure...
At this point I think I would have thrown up had I actually been in the meeting. After that, the meeting went downhill really fast. Apparently the Navy's requirements for the CRAP program required it to have X mean time between failure, and they could do no better than Y, where Y << X. So did the Navy's testing unit ask the CRAP developers to fix the issues? Nope. They just changed the definition of failure until the mean time matched the spec. Why you might ask? Because the Navy's testing unit does not get dinged for every bug they allow to be released into the field. What they do get dinged for is spending too much money testing the program. Retesting after asking for fixes obviously takes money, so they are loath to do it unless the program is completely useless.
Some days I am amazed that anything in the military works...
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5 comments:
I am not sure what I read, but it sounds bad.
Eric is the super blogger! He likes to blog!
Eric, your fans want your philosophical looks on life! Give us some!
That's so fucking funny, but sad, all at the same time.
I've had times where we'd write some software and it wouldn't jive with the requirements specification so they'd just change the requirements so our software would meet them.
Granted, the "requirements specification" was a half-assed document pulled out of someone's ass and passed around like a crack whore to every engineer to have his way with it.....and upon reflection this seems to be way worse than going back to change the reqs.
:(
Philosophical outlooks will have to wait. I already have blogs written for next 2 days. Check back often!
Make that 3 days.
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