
Lockheed Reassigns Workers to Fix F-35 Software - olympus
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/06/19/lockheed-reassigns-workers-to-fix-f35-software.html
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LowKarmaAccount
> The F-35 requires more than 8 million lines of code, compared with about 2
> million for the F-16 and less than 1 million for other fourth-generation
> fighter aircraft

The F-35 is programmed in C++, while the other aircraft are programmed in Ada,
which is one of the reasons that there is so much more code. When you have to
code, test, and maintain 8 million lines of C++ in an environment where a
single bug can be deadly, you should expect delays.

The choice of using C++ to write a system that is designed to never crash and
the obvious ignorance of the "mythical man month" does not give a good
impression of Lockheed's management.

~~~
olympus
> system that is designed to never crash

Oh, they crash. Software on currently fielded jets crash all the time, pilots
call them "software anomalies."

Systems are designed to fail softly and reboot quickly (~1 minute) and
sometimes do so automatically without physically crashing the jet. Sometimes
the pilot won't even notice.

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iyulaev
_sometimes do so automatically without physically crashing the jet_

I hope by "sometimes" you mean "almost every time!"

~~~
olympus
Sorry, bad grammar. I meant that sometimes they reboot automatically. The
systems are designed to always reboot without physically crashing the jet, but
sometimes the pilot has to command the reboot themselves.

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bediger4000
Any one who's worked at Martin Marietta in the past (now part of Lockheed)
will recognize this. Martin had a long, long history of doing this sort of
thing for projects in trouble.

When they get past this (and they will, they have the DoD over a barrel, they
just have to not gloat too publicly) the fallout to the F-35 will last as long
as F-35s are in operation. In the early 90s, Martin people hand-assembled
Titan rocket guidance and control software because some time in the distant
past, the assembler had some bugs. The F-35 software group will live with
whatever horrific "best practices" the current group of reassigned workers
come up with.

~~~
masklinn
> In the early 90s, Martin people hand-assembled Titan rocket guidance and
> control software

What the fuck?

~~~
bediger4000
To be completely truthful, they compared binary dumps of hand-assembled, and
machine-assembled software, to ensure that everything was exactly the same.
But yes, they hand-assembled some weird instruction set. I can't recall asking
if they assembled to ASCII hexadecimal word (24-bit) representations, or to
something else.

I believe this was for "Commerical Titan", a short-lived, Titan 34D variant.
Four flights, one of which left Intelsat VI in the wrong orbit. That wasn't
software, but plugging the wrong cable in.

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AnIrishDuck
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

\- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. "The Mythical Man-Month".

~~~
jere
>Nine women can't make a baby in one month.

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macmac
Not only have they added 200 engineers from other projects which will now
suffer delays and quality issues, both also "They're running 24-7, what we
call lights out." which will ensure massive burn out. Brilliant...

~~~
sliverstorm
If you time it right, you don't have to hit burnout. In my view, "timing it
right" basically means completing the project before burnout. A successful
completion followed by a little R&R goes an incredibly long way to combating
burnout.

~~~
macmac
And I suppose they will use their awesome estimation powers that have led them
into this mess, to time it right...

~~~
sliverstorm
Exactly ;)

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kevincennis
"There’s nothing wrong with flying before we buy. In fact, most of us test
drive cars before we [buy]"

Except that if we custom-order a car, the manufacturer isn't legally
prohibited from selling it to someone else if we end up refusing to buy it.

~~~
davorak
There analogy is not good, but I would also assume that lockheed won a
competitive bidding process to get the contract as well. They promised to
build it at a certain price and in a certain time.

~~~
kevincennis
Yup, Lockheed's X-35 beat out a (horrendously ugly) Boeing airplane to win the
contract, but my understanding was that the initial orders were cost-plus.
That's pretty typical for large procurements of advanced aircraft. It's hard
to know long it will take and how much it will cost to build something that
bleeding-edge.

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sp332
The mythical man-month in action!

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jongraehl
"Accountability". A conspicuously heroic effort (likely counterproductive
long-run), because their +$6 billion drip is threatened by lawmakers who don't
think they're taking this whole thing seriously.

For the sake of whatever competent programmers were already working on the
system, I hope this is mostly PR noise.

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stcredzero
That plane is not a replacement for the A-10, unless you kid yourself. The
loiter time is atrocious.

~~~
nether
Because loitering and enduring battle damage make _so_ much sense in an era of
countermeasure-immune SAMs and huge directed-shrapnel warheads. Spitting DU
rounds onto a city block also isn't a great idea in today's conflicts. The
A-10 is obsolete, the tankbuster role is obsolete, the F-35 isn't perfect but
is far more appropriate for today's conflicts.

~~~
kbolino
Yet we fight a lot of "obsolete" enemies. The effectiveness of the F-35 won't
be known until it is battle-tested. Before then, it's all rainbows and
unicorns.

~~~
jfb
We aren't likely to see masses of T-72s rolling under uncontested airspace any
time again.

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vaadu
The program should be cancelled.

It's way over budget, not as stealthy as originally claimed and completely
unnecessary. The DOD should be putting this money and effort into UAVs.

I also have to wonder how quickly the Chinese will get the software updates.

