Re: The BAA and new BCS membership requirements

Looking at baggage handling systems turned up interesting articles.

It looks like software practices is a lot of woodoo.

The real world and software world have not met yet.

http://www.westword.com/2007-08-30/news/dia-conspiracies-take-off/full

"on average every line of code developed needs to be rewritten once,"
bemoaned an internal FAA report.

http://www.cis.gsu.edu/~mmoore/CIS3300/handouts/SciAmSept1994.html

Capability Maturity Model (CMM). "It provides a vision of software
engineering and management excellence,"
The CMM uses a five-level scale, ranging from chaos at level 1 to the
paragon of good management at level 5
"The vast majority-about 75 percent-are still stuck in level 1,"
Curtis reports. "They have no formal process, no measurements of what
they do and no way of knowing when they are on the wrong track or off
the track altogether."

"Denver's airport planners saddled BAE with $20 million worth of
changes to the design of its baggage system long after construction
had begun. IBM has been similarly bedeviled by the indecision of FAA
managers. Both companies naively assumed that once their design was
approved, they would be left in peace to build it."

"formal methods can guarantee only that software meets its
specification, not that it can handle the surprises of the real
world."

"developers test a program by running it the way they intend it to be
used, which often bears scant resemblance to real-world conditions"

"mature engineering fields codify proved solutions in handbooks so
that even novices can consistently handle routine designs, freeing
more talented practitioners for advanced projects. No such handbook
yet exists for software, so mistakes are repeated on project after
project, year after year."

"Programmers have for decades used libraries of subroutines to avoid
rewriting the same code over and over. But these components break down
when they are moved to a different programming language, computer
platform or operating environment. "The tragedy is that as hardware
becomes obsolete, an excellent expression of a sorting algorithm
written in the 1960s has to be rewritten,"

"buyers want to pay for a component once and make copies for free."

"Basic things like designing code inspections, producing user
documentation and maintaining aging software are not covered in
academia,"