Posts by Agent_99

I worked for a major Defense Contractor on Federal computer projects for 28 years.

My pet peeve was operational staff who tried to use Deficiency Complaints as a back-end method of scope creep.

Essentially, the staff member wanted a new feature that was not included in the official change requirements, neither at the system level or the software level.

These were staff members who did not have input into the official software change requirements, so they tried to make deficiency complaints that their needs were not being satisfied, because the new software did not deliver some nice individual feature that they personally considered to be a requirement.

Acceptance Review meetings were usually a piece of cake, except for the inevitable political fight where users refused to sign off the delivery because of their pet peeve, and the software group refused to deliver features that were not part of the formal Requirements.

Good software, bad reality

I worked with a Fortran program that stored telemetry data from a satellite download. The satellite was designed to last 32,000 orbits, and the software worked fine. But the satellite kept working, and exceeded its design lifetime. On orbit 32,768 the software program failed. The problem was that the Fortran software used 16-bit integer variable data-types, which satisfied the satellite lifetime design objective, but the actual satellite was over-engineered and refused to die on schedule. The managers decided to blame the software instead of the satellite. That caused expensive fixes to a lot of networked software around the world.

I am somewhat annoyed that Tim lists a $15 hourly wage as an economic downer, but has no objection to million-dollar pay raises for Corporate Executives and Board Members. I am sure that executive salaries are amortized across unit prices, but we never see any out-sourcing to replace these high-priced individuals, either. Can't we get some H-2 visas to import low-priced foreign CxO's, because there is such a shortage of qualified U.S. CxO's at our chosen price point.

Too important to upgrade

I once worked at a new U.S. Government server facility that was too important to risk any service failures. Fortunately, the boxes served an isolated Guv network over continent-wide leased lines.

After 5 years, they were forced to upgrade because the old Operating Systems could not support any new hardware or software.

Fortunately, money was not a problem.

The Guv paid my company to build an entire suite of replacement hardware/software systems at our support factory, using Operating System software that was upgraded by 2 major versions. The new equipment was air-freighted to the remote location, and installed in parallel with the old reliable systems.

After the cutover, the new servers were backed up with online duplicates. All new patches and user software are installed for 2 months on the duplicate systems, to verify reliability before upgrading the main servers.

Eventually, the Guv scheduled downtimes up to 4 hours for migrations and new installations.

But they keep the previous systems ready to go live immediately if needed.