| Submit your comments on this article |
| Economy |
| Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers |
| 2019-06-30 |
| (Bloomberg) -- It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.'s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India. In offices across from Seattle's Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max. The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, "it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code," Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, "it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly." |
| Posted by:Clese Elmolet8966 |
| #16 Any idiot can write software! Or was that "many idiots"? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2019-06-30 17:06 |
| #15 TW. You are right on but testers are not idiots. They are not programmers either. They are the real world users who make up the internal QA process before it goes into production. System testing in every possible weather environment possible. NO CORNERS CUT. Boeing is now CYAing with MSM help. WHY?? They are being sued. By families of the deceased and pilots afraid they will be told to fly the MAX. They are being watched by the FAA. Why are they pointing fingers all of a sudden? (I guarantee you, since the grounding they have found a long list of software bugs that should have been found during initial development. That is evidence that will be used against them. They need to find scape goats to share the pain with and hopefully earn redemption. |
| Posted by: Phaick Uneretle6310 2019-06-30 16:47 |
| #14 A German colleague told us that the Berlin airport saga was Chicago-esque, with suitcases of money changing hands and work done that had to be undone. |
| Posted by: james 2019-06-30 14:01 |
| #13 @Procopius2k 1. You can have it on time 2. You can have it on budget 3. You can have it done right You get only two of the three, now which are they? I'd put my bet on one and two. If only. Berlin Airport got zero out of the three. |
| Posted by: European Conservative 2019-06-30 12:09 |
| #12 I teach a software methodology called Scrum. In Scrum, you test your code CONSTANTLY - every day, a little piece at a time. There is also something called Test Driven Development - where you write your test code BEFORE you write the actual code. I wonder if Boeing uses either one of these methodologies, which are all the rage in the software world today. |
| Posted by: Rambler in Virginia 2019-06-30 10:16 |
| #11 Looks like Boeing was using Third World programmers to do the software development and Third World airlines to do the QA testing. Bad decisions in the board room. Senior management, why do they hate us? And, excuse me if I don't know much about aviation, but my understanding of the auto pilot feature is that you wait until the plane reaches a cruising altitude to turn it on and then only to keep the plane on course until you reach your destination. Even then you must have a manual override feature to let the human pilots take over if necessary. Let the human pilots do the take offs and landings. If auto pilot takes off, cruises and lands then you don't need human pilots, right? But I think the software is not quite ready for that. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2019-06-30 10:04 |
| #10 After more than 30 years in all aspects of software development this really does seem to be the culmination of cut corners. First- when budget or schedule is tight the first thing to go is testing. Second thing to go is documentation. Third thing is independent testing, test your own work is the rule. Given how many IT shops I've worked in I can almost hear the conversations. My experience in general is that the Indians are competent for basic stuff but have no initiative, the Eastern Europeans were arrogant and wouldn't follow directions. The big six consultants insisted on being in charge and ordering everyone around even if they didn't know what the project was. Yes there were exceptions but they were few and far between. Cluster frick doesn't even begin to describe it. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2019-06-30 08:48 |
| #9 One of my customers has gradually moved to using Indian coders vs. American and their in-house applications have become crappier and crappier. |
| Posted by: Hupolet Bourbon1119 2019-06-30 08:07 |
| #8 SUITS There's a saying in development 1. You can have it on time 2. You can have it on budget 3. You can have it done right You get only two of the three, now which are they? I'd put my bet on one and two. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2019-06-30 07:19 |
| #7 ...Boeing is now thisclose to explaining up on Capitol Hill just what the hell is going on over there: *The 737 MAX debacle, obviously *They're still having show-stopping problems with the KC-46 Pegasus - technical problems, especially the remote refueling system (probably the DUMBEST gorram idea ever bolted on to a US military aircraft) and what can no longer be described as anything other than sabotage by the Boeing Renton assembly crews (material left in critical spaces), and God alone knows how much of that screwed up code has made it into the airplane, and *Now there's reports of MCAS-type problems popping up with the 787. Somebody decided to cut a corner too many, and now they get to pay for it. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2019-06-30 07:03 |
| #6 #4 - *snicker* |
| Posted by: Frank G 2019-06-30 06:43 |
| #5 Wait, do you have to be under or over qualified to be part of an idiot-test group? |
| Posted by: Charles 2019-06-30 03:25 |
| #4 Fred will give me a sterling recommendation if they need someone to be the idiot to test their idiot-proof code... |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2019-06-30 02:24 |
| #3 Thirdly and lastly, Boeing AND Bloomberg and the USA are totally lost and are way, way off track now. This is truly frightening because more lives are going to be lost on Boeing planes. |
| Posted by: Phaick Uneretle6310 2019-06-30 00:58 |
| #2 "it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly." P.S. Many rounds is not even close to enough. I want to see thousands and thousands of bugs caught by QA and fixed by the programmers in the most likely hundreds of thousands of lines of code in the system. |
| Posted by: Phaick Uneretle6310 2019-06-30 00:53 |
| #1 The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, "it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code," Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, "it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly." Sorry, but it is not just cheap, foreign coders. Long before foreign coders were even thought of being brought in, US Corporations run by incompetent top management could not release decent code written by $100 an hour US software engineers for ONE REASON. They had no idea how to TEST CODE. I have seen huge enterprise systems crash resulting in multiple VPs and large development groups sh8t canned and replaced. Did that fix the problem???? NO! Not until a decent, real world, internal test environment was established did things finally half way begin to work out in the real world. This is a sign that Boeing still does not get it. Don't fly in their products until stop blaming cheap or expensive programmers and begin talking about what programmers desperately need and that is a world class systems test environment layer. And tell these loser execs to get out of the liberal political arena to get promotions and government work and back to turning out A++ results. |
| Posted by: Phaick Uneretle6310 2019-06-30 00:51 |