

What the F-86 can teach us about software development - orlick
http://managingmetrics.com/what-the-f-86-can-teach-us-about-software-dev

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parfe
What a disappointing conclusion to an interesting historial blurb. American
shot down lots of Russians because we had fly by wire planes. So Pair
programming and stand up meetings are the obvious conclusion.

What a joke.

~~~
gvb
Nitpick, the controls were "mechanically assisted" (i.e. "power steering"),
not fly by wire. The first FBW fighter was the F-16.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_Falcon)

~~~
borism
sorry to burst your bubble (again), but it wasn't.

[http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/220176-first-aircraft-use-
fly...](http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/220176-first-aircraft-use-fly-
wire.html)

[http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/f-9....](http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/f-9.htm)

<http://www.globalaircraft.org/planes/cf-105_avro_arrow.pl>

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hassy
In addition to the tenuous link between the two activities, the 10 to 1 ratio
is almost certainly untrue.

Details here (in the main text and in cited materials):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-86_Sabre#Korean_War>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiG-15#Operational_history>

Isolating success in dogfights to flight controls seems like a gross
oversimplification. I would like to see the original source for this
(attributed to Boyd in the article).

~~~
borism
I love how you're being downvoted for pointing to more realistic numbers.

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billswift
Slight nit. >but because their arms didn’t tire as quickly from operating the
flight controls

While tiring would be a factor, even if completely fresh, you can simply move
a lesser weight (force) faster than a larger one.

Second problem is that there were multiple differences between MiGs and Sabres
- the one I always heard was most significant, back when I was a teen, is that
Sabres were better constructed, MiGs were more likely to fall apart from
relatively light damage. So don't take _any_ single article or viewpoint as
_the truth_ \- reality is always more complex than will fit into a article or
book.

~~~
Symmetry
Another important difference that went along with Boyd's thesis is that the
Sabres had less obstructed canopies, letting the pilot see around themselves
more easily.

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pedrocr
See "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" for a more complete
description of his life. The article doesn't do it justice.

[http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-
Changed/dp/0316...](http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-
Changed/dp/0316796883/)

~~~
jedc
Or the book "Certain to Win" which was written by one of his "disciples" with
Boyd's input on how to apply all of Boyd's thoughts (which are _far_ more
complex than what the blog post shows) to business situations.

[http://www.amazon.com/Certain-Win-Strategy-Applied-
Business/...](http://www.amazon.com/Certain-Win-Strategy-Applied-
Business/dp/1413453767/)

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moxiemk1
This reminds me of a programming assignment from college to write a chess bot.

My partner and I tweaked it's understanding of how to evaluate board positions
to eek out better playing ability, but the _major_ improvements came from
implementing a more efficient specialized game tree that let us calculate
another move ahead every decision.

Having one more "loop" made a huge difference against our opponents; being
simply smarter or better at any of the "steps in the loop" didn't help nearly
as much.

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saurabh
>>Boyd realized the key advantage of the F-86 was that it’s flight controls
were mechanically assisted.

I am guesssing what that means is it's the tools and not the process. The
process is subconscious. The tools that we use, determine how fast we can
iterate. Take RoR for example, or Visual Basic(F5 anyone?), developers could
iterate rapidly and after a while the process faded away, but the tools
remained. Maybe, developers need to play with new toys instead of following
new processes.

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yread
Pity. I thought the article would be something like this
[http://etutorials.org/Programming/Software+architecture+in+p...](http://etutorials.org/Programming/Software+architecture+in+practice,+second+edition/Part+One+Envisioning+Architecture/Chapter+3.+A-7E+Avionics+System+A+Case+Study+in+Utilizing+Architectural+Structures/3.3+Architecture+for+the+A-7E+Avionics+System/)

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callmeed
Totally tangential but when I was a kid (in the 80s) there was a school/park
somewhere in So Cal (I think) that had an actual F-86 on its playground
(gutted of course). Whenever we road tripped on the weekend my parents would
climb stop there and I'd climb up on it.

