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> In total, the team made over 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes across 21 test flights.

I'm sure they're working much more rigorously than typical "tech" company software developers, and maybe the writer used that sentence to commend the scale of effort that contributed to a success.

But, to a tech industry software engineer ear, the sentence sounds different. Heavy reactive software changes would typically mean a lot of defects and tech debt introduced.

Here's to hoping that autonomous fighter jets aren't programmed anything at all like cat pictures sharing apps are.

("Commit #37f2ad30 - Fixed missing minus sign that had airplane flying upside-down.")




100,000 LOC modified - 21 tests. Ship it.

In all seriousness, I hope that includes simulation code / integration tests and the 21 test flights were essentially E2E tests.


Seriously, that line strikes fear into my heart and I only handle rest APIs not billion dollar airplanes with actual people in them.


Dont go by the price tag. Thats just MIL complex accounting called "Cost plus" which means price = cost + whatever they feel like. Cuz Govt cant go anywhere else to buy this stuff.


> Thats just MIL complex accounting called "Cost plus" which means price = cost + whatever they feel like.

Directionally correct, but technically incorrect.

The fudge factor is in the “cost”. The “plus” (essentially the profit) is set.


Could be many lines of removed code. I imagine they may have introduced a simpler interface offloading governance to configuration data.


$ cargo update

+8,967 −7,331


> I'm sure they're working much more rigorously than typical "tech" company software developers

I was sure about Boeing as well.


it's also likely that lines is higher than normal because of how close to bare metal they have to be.


As the cost of failure rises, so does the value of the test suite.




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