Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statement [pdf]

Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by nabla9 on Monday May 02, 2016 @12:08PM (#11612646)

F-35 looks like it's the most ambitious software project ever attempted.

- Lots of system integration for the final product from multiple suppliers (usually nightmare).

- Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is critical for the maintainability and it's millions of lines of code. Failure rate of large projects like this is typically 40-60% and ALIS looks like it's more advanced than most bean counting systems ever delivered.

- Underlying hardware is slowly changing underneath because the system is late.

- It has frigging augmented reality system with helmets that integrates everything together.

- It's safety critical code.

> no less than 27 power cycles were required to get all systems functioning between initial startup and takeoff. These power cycles varied in degree – from “cold iron” resets, where the aircraft had to be shut down and then restarted, to component or battery power recycling.

Holy shit!

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by brohee on Monday May 02, 2016 @01:09PM (#11613304)

>> no less than 27 power cycles were required to get all systems functioning between initial startup and takeoff. These power cycles varied in degree – from “cold iron” resets, where the aircraft had to be shut down and then restarted, to component or battery power recycling.

> Holy shit!

Even more extraordinary that they found someone willing to takeoff after that...

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by engi_nerd on Monday May 02, 2016 @01:17PM (#11613382)

Those are 27 power cycles spread across all the different flights described in that section of the document, not 27 power cycles for one single flight.

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by wrong_variable on Monday May 02, 2016 @12:13PM (#11612704)

This is what so many non-software people trying to make decisions on software fail to realize - every constraint added increases the complexity of software by an order of magnitude.

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by sbov on Monday May 02, 2016 @12:34PM (#11612937)

I run into this at work all the time.

Me: FYI, in scenario xyz, I updated the documentation to do abc. It seems like the best balance of complication and doing the right thing, especially considering it will almost never come up.

Boss: why does it even matter what it does? It will come up maybe once per year. Oh, and it should do <this other really specific and complicated thing> instead, so do that.

Me: sigh....

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by beamatronic on Monday May 02, 2016 @01:20PM (#11613422)

Maybe you can explain it to them this way - if they know what a function is. If you have a function that does something, foo, and it takes one boolean parameter, that's two test cases. If you add a second boolean parameter, now you have at least four total test cases. And so on.

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by wmeredith on Monday May 02, 2016 @02:17PM (#11613964)

Ah yes, give it to them in functions and boolean parameters, that will get the non-programmers on board. /s

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by oconnore on Monday May 02, 2016 @03:42PM (#11614843)

My house has a vacuum, a lawnmower, a blender, a washing machine, 20 light switches, a 4 zone heating system, and 6 sinks/showers. I can manage 1.71e10 possible states while I sleep, why are you struggling with four?

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by awinter-py on Monday May 02, 2016 @12:32PM (#11612911)

well, a binary order of magnitude maybe

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by russell on Monday May 02, 2016 @03:54PM (#11614965)

Indeed. There was a paper done in the 70s or 80s that found that operating system size doubled with each new feature. Picture going from single tasking to multitasking or to virtual memory. Sorry, I cant dredge up the reference.

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by Shivetya on Monday May 02, 2016 @12:22PM (#11612806)

one last hurrah at attempting to keeping human pilots relevant

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by happyslobro on Monday May 02, 2016 @03:25PM (#11614672)

Ctrl+Alt+Delete

"Abort, retry or fail?"

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by dsfuoi on Monday May 02, 2016 @05:20PM (#11615746)

Choose carefully, one of those deploys the ejection seat.

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Re:Status of F-35 – Senate Armed Services Committee Statemen... by erichurkman on Monday May 02, 2016 @02:45PM (#11614252)

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

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