...rambling...

[mithriltabby]

In today’s meeting, I expressed my relief that our current project at EFI is code-named “Atlantic”, which is something that is unlikely to explode or catch fire. Our standard product here, you see, is named “Fiery”, and is not exactly crashproof.

Someday, in some context, whether a game or a story (if ever I get my fiction writing career off the ground), I’m going to have to work in a bit of future history concerning the spaceplane named Icarus.

When a pointy-haired marketer at the aerospace company suggested the name, the engineers, as one, blanched and suggested some alternatives. When the marketer insisted, the engineers came back with cost estimates based on a design with quintuple redundant fail-safe systems and overengineering to handle an order of magnitude more peak stress than expected.

The project gets approved, and proceeds toward implementation. Sometime after the budgetary point of no return, the pointy-haired marketer gets sacked and replaced with a sensible one, who realizes that it’s a unique opportunity: no one could have gotten approval for this on a business plan because of the expense of overengineering, but now that it’s do-or-die, the company can sell the thing on its safety features. Space transport accidents, after all, gather a lot of bad press, and even if the probability of an accident is lower than getting hit by a car, people with precious payloads may be willing to shell out a little more for the mental security of flying the safest thing in the sky.

So the Icarus winds up with an excellent service record, and kicks off a quiet revolution in quality control.

This is all part of a musing I came up with a while ago when looking at the whole notion of cutting-edge cyberpunk technology: as a software engineer, would I want something running anything with the quality of modern technology surgically implanted? I decided that any believable future that included a notion of widespread reliable implant technology would require that there had been, at some manner of Quality Revolution. Occasional slogans have occured to me, the best of which was: “How many loved ones have you lost to software errors?”

Comments

[random-girl.livejournal.com]

A terrible project was in front of us at ReleaseNow: they wanted us to create a web ui to do something that previously lots of phone calls made happen, utilizing globetrotter licensing and voodoo, for Intel. In like 2 weeks. We pushed for 2 months (still not really enough time) and then while the engineers were running around planning how to keep the sky from falling, I was standing with Kristina trying to think of a name when the Marketing guy (who reigned this hell down on us) stepped up and listened. My initial idea was "Camelot" and before I could explain why, the Marketing guy went crazy. "I love it," he said. "We'll tell the customers that, they'll love it, too!!!" and then he ran away.

Kristina was pretty unhappy. Then I explained that Camelot had pretty much ended, bloodily, because of betrayal, incest, and war, which is pretty much how I figured this project (which really needed 6 months) was going to go in the 2 months allotted. She loved it.

We spent a lot of time laughing at the Marketing people during meetings. More like giggling, really.

[grandmoffdavid.livejournal.com]

would I want something running anything with the quality of modern technology surgically implanted?

Depends if the technology company has to go through the FDA or not. They even check software for errors these days. Trust me, we really aren't that far off from some of the kinds of things you read about, and probably more advanced than others.

[mithriltabby]

Hmmm... the Food, Drug, Cyberware, and Biotech Administration... I like it...

[abditus.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of a story that reportedly happened to some colleges of my manager:

Various dev-team managers are sitting in on a quality assurance seminar. The speaker asks, "Who here would be willing to fly in a plane with software written by your own team?" Everybody starts looking around. Out of the whole audience only one member raises their hand.

Speaker: You're a brave soul.

Audience Member: Not really, I knew it would never get off the ground.