Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

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colechristensen

Processes in aviation and defense are long, drawn out affairs but they're also the result of successfully managing projects orders of magnitude bigger than any software company could dream of. (say, a decade between drawing board and first prototype, another decade until full production)

Lots of up front planning in great detail with timelines and details dependencies. Lots of understanding how schedules slip. Some space systems go to the levels of planning for a number of bugs and if the result is off high or low, it is a matter for investigation.

Also, no daily meetings (unless culture has changed since I was inside a while back).

The most important things are an advanced method of requirements generation and change management.

It seems like almost everyone in the software industry is just making shit up as they go along which is... themed to the right way to do things but not actually doing it. Cargo cult processes.

> Also, no daily meetings (unless culture has changed since I was inside a while back).

I can confirm that the big management consulting firms are selling modified "agile" processes to the MIC and the US military itself. I suspect that means they're selling them to most large orgs with that sort of culture.

I don't know whether they're complete bullshit and don't actually mean much as far as how things actually operate—hopefully that's the case. If it's actually changing anything and not just shuffling around some names for processes, I assume it's making things worse.

Thank you for sharing! I really find these industries fascinating and hope to work in one of those someday.

> "The most important things are an advanced method of requirements generation and change management."

Makes perfect sense seeing how those wrecking havoc in far simpler software I'm working on. Thanks very much for sharing.

I have also never seen requirements or change control being done anywhere outside defense in any way near "correctly" or in a way which was useful.

It is absolutely useful when you're doing a 10 billion dollar project with dozens of contractors when your customer is say, the Army.

The way I've seen all of these things done in commercial software is like middle managers heard about requirements in an elevator while drunk and went home and decided to implement them. i.e. nobody know at all what they're doing, and they're trying to accomplish something they've heard of but never come close to experiencing done well.

I feel the same way about Agile. It came from the way a group of smart effective people worked together and decided to share... it's being implemented almost everywhere by people who are looking for a set of guidelines to follow and don't at all grok the point of any of it.

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