

New era of software (vs traditional) engineering proving tricky for Toyota - bendtheblock
http://www.economist.com/science-technology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15560827&fsrc=rss

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rubyrescue
This article does nothing to explain why software engineering is more tricky
for toyota, other than saying that they're forced to release models faster
(industry-wide problem), and a set of scare quotes around the word engineer
when referring to software guys...

I'm not in the states right now (and the economist is mostly, but not
entirely, written in the UK, not sure about economist online) but my sense is
that there is a lot of hype in the states, and now I assume the UK, about the
Toyota problems without a lot of substance to the reporting about what the
actual issues are.

If anyone has found a good website/blog/mainstream article that explains the
issues clearly, i'd love to read them.

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rm-rf
I didn't think that the article was saying that software engineering is more
difficult for Toyota than it is for other care makers, but rather that
software engineering doesn't bring with it the 60 years of QA knowledge and
process that mechanical engineering has in the Japanese auto industry, and
that the lessons of those 50 years that make mechanical engineering so well
refined are not readily transferred over to software engineering.

Having said that, I didn't think that Toyota's problems were strictly software
related.

~~~
pzarecta
That's funny since the Toyota Production System is the inspiration for today's
Lean Development Practices. Apparently, someone else extended those 60 years
of learning into software development but didn't tell Toyota about it.

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nitrogen
The article provided an interesting history of the Japanese auto industry,
went into a fair level of detail on statistical control, then completely
choked with a couple of lines of opinion on "software," as though it's an
abstract substance that we can blame all our problems on (like witches,
republicans, or Al Gore). It's like the author hit his or her word limit with
all the history and didn't have time or space to coherently tie things
together.

The author should have done some research into software quality control
techniques to complement the SQC/6sigma background, such as MISRA-C (the safer
subset of C used in automotive systems) and unit testing. Another page of text
and a bit less whining about the good old days of the metal bashers and this
could be a decent article.

P.S. Thank-you pg for creating HN. The comments on here are, without fail,
better than anything on the sites referenced. The overall tone and
intelligence of comments on a site are a reflection on a publication's average
reader, and from the looks of this article, The Economist has nothing on
Hacker News.

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andrewcooke
is that the whole article? it reads like an introduction - where's the main
body that explains _why_ software is the problem?

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yason
I would take it as such that Toyota just happened to be the first to get hit
by this. The others are no less vulnerable.

As software propagates into the design of previously mechanical products,
we'll get more of these. There must be lots of bugs in other car models and
makes that could surface anytime.

Avionics software does keep planes in air but if you applied the same level of
rigor to making automotive software nobody could afford the cars.

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pg
And Sony.

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chadmalik
Call me a luddite but I really prefer driving a car with no software in
between my foot and the parts that govern acceleration and deceleration.

Just because you CAN use software for something doesn't mean you SHOULD use
software for it.

