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Boeing Starliner: 2 SW bugs found, patched, uploaded in-flight to avoid disaster
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wraper:

--- Quote ---By the time I visited the company—for Fortune, in 2000—that had begun to change. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas—so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant. “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money, went the joke around Seattle.”
--- End quote ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/
tooki:

--- Quote from: wraper on March 04, 2020, 08:03:56 am ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on March 04, 2020, 07:56:17 am ---Boeing has some serious core engineering problems that need to be addressed.

--- End quote ---
More like management problems.

--- Quote ---(perhaps some of the engineering transplants from MD are responsible for the fuckups at Boeing?)
--- End quote ---
Management transplants. There was internal joke that McDonnell bought Boeing with Boeing's money.

--- End quote ---
Heh, the same thing happened with Apple, where we say that NeXT bought Apple with negative money. The difference is that NeXT’s management replacing Apple’s (in 1997) was an indisputable win, whereas McDD’s management was a clear downgrade from Boeing’s.
Rerouter:
When you skip testing, or just have horrible tools for testing, things start catching up with you in short order.

About 1 year ago, I finally was able to pry enough information about how a bit of automotive electronics scripting was made, turns out its simple stack scripts, lets you read in data from the CANBUS, process it and react accordingly, including writing back to the CAN

These scripts where mostly copy-pasta only 300-700 lines, the grey beard that retired 5 years ago wrote it, so we don't question it kind of crap.

Well I went and wrote an emulator for there scripting language, just to check things out, as we kept seeing weird behavior in the data it was logging, and little hard to replicate glitches.

Turns out the grey beard code was pushing an error value to stack any time it could not handle a packet, but never removed it. so the glitches where the stack hitting something it shouldn't, causing a very rapid reboot, however there debugger that they test scripts with, would remove that value, so they would never see the issue in testing, combined with only feeding "good" data to the scripts so they rarely handled packets that would trigger this behavior.

I went and re-wrote the problematic scripts, explained what was going wrong, and how to fix it, even shared the emulator with the company, and don't think I have had a door slammed harder in my face before, with all future updates with the same bugs, that I would then patch.... company culture and ego plays a big part in these things.
SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: Rerouter on March 04, 2020, 09:36:19 am ---When you skip testing, or just have horrible tools for testing, things start catching up with you in short order.

About 1 year ago, I finally was able to pry enough information about how a bit of automotive electronics scripting was made, turns out its simple stack scripts, lets you read in data from the CANBUS, process it and react accordingly, including writing back to the CAN

These scripts where mostly copy-pasta only 300-700 lines, the grey beard that retired 5 years ago wrote it, so we don't question it kind of crap.

Well I went and wrote an emulator for there scripting language, just to check things out, as we kept seeing weird behavior in the data it was logging, and little hard to replicate glitches.

Turns out the grey beard code was pushing an error value to stack any time it could not handle a packet, but never removed it. so the glitches where the stack hitting something it shouldn't, causing a very rapid reboot, however there debugger that they test scripts with, would remove that value, so they would never see the issue in testing, combined with only feeding "good" data to the scripts so they rarely handled packets that would trigger this behavior.

I went and re-wrote the problematic scripts, explained what was going wrong, and how to fix it, even shared the emulator with the company, and don't think I have had a door slammed harder in my face before, with all future updates with the same bugs, that I would then patch.... company culture and ego plays a big part in these things.

--- End quote ---

Perhaps echoes of what happened at Volkswagen, with the emissions scandal.  Many people knew...  but did not want to know.
tooki:

--- Quote from: Rerouter on March 04, 2020, 09:36:19 am ---I went and re-wrote the problematic scripts, explained what was going wrong, and how to fix it, even shared the emulator with the company, and don't think I have had a door slammed harder in my face before, with all future updates with the same bugs, that I would then patch.... company culture and ego plays a big part in these things.

--- End quote ---
Oh man, I hear you.

Very few people have the magical skills to successfully approach companies with a “hey, your product/website/menu/whatever sucks, and I’m the right person to fix it!”
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