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Hop into our self-driving car! It was designed by a team of inexperienced developers working under a manager who foreshortened deadlines and delivered ahead of

Hop into our self-driving car! It was designed by a team of inexperienced developers working under a manager who foreshortened deadlines and delivered ahead of schedule and under budget! The software guys asked for crazy things like 'bug trackers' and 'static analysis tools', but we kept their nose to the grindstone. Some of them said the software required more testing, but you know software guys, always such nervous ninnies. Luckily we maintained the standard business practice of keeping every employee replacable so that there were no worries when we booted those guys. Don't forget to read the fine print about the driver actually needing to keep their hands on the wheel and ready to correct the car should it do anything improper. You bear full responsibility for anything the car does. And have fun!

HeroOfAges 9y ago
Haha! Love it! This is precisely how enterprise software is developed and if you look at the way our industry has trained its managers, I can't think of any reason why the people that make decisions about these things can be convinced to do anything differently. I mean, if you can build buggy software for a Point of Service system this way, surely you can do the same thing with self driving cars! It's just software! How hard can it be?
- otakucode 9y ago
  One would like to think it would be handled by auto manufacturers. But one would be DEAD (literally) wrong. We found this out a few years ago when Toyota killed a couple people with their cars and their "unintended acceleration". The degree to which they were egregiously negligent was astonishing. They were doing development around 2010... and didn't have a bug tracker. Just, nope, no way for developers to keep track of and tell one another about bugs. Who would need such a luxury? Just don't make bugs! The auto industry has a big list of 90+ required standard practices in coding firmware, and 30+ 'recommended' practices. Toyota claimed to adopt 9 of the required ones, but repeatedly violated 3 in the code, nailing 6. The CPU didn't even have error-checking RAM despite Toyotas claims that it did. It was patently absurd how bad - and how utterly standard - their practices were. And the court looked at it and said "yep, no negligence here. Software has no standards. There are no licensed engineers to hire. Go ahead and do whatever the hell you want, even if it kills people you're fine." No company is going to take the millions of dollars worth of precautions necessary to prevent things like that.

HeroOfAges 9y ago

Haha! Love it! This is precisely how enterprise software is developed and if you look at the way our industry has trained its managers, I can't think of any reason why the people that make decisions about these things can be convinced to do anything differently. I mean, if you can build buggy software for a Point of Service system this way, surely you can do the same thing with self driving cars! It's just software! How hard can it be?

otakucode 9y ago
One would like to think it would be handled by auto manufacturers. But one would be DEAD (literally) wrong. We found this out a few years ago when Toyota killed a couple people with their cars and their "unintended acceleration". The degree to which they were egregiously negligent was astonishing. They were doing development around 2010... and didn't have a bug tracker. Just, nope, no way for developers to keep track of and tell one another about bugs. Who would need such a luxury? Just don't make bugs! The auto industry has a big list of 90+ required standard practices in coding firmware, and 30+ 'recommended' practices. Toyota claimed to adopt 9 of the required ones, but repeatedly violated 3 in the code, nailing 6. The CPU didn't even have error-checking RAM despite Toyotas claims that it did. It was patently absurd how bad - and how utterly standard - their practices were. And the court looked at it and said "yep, no negligence here. Software has no standards. There are no licensed engineers to hire. Go ahead and do whatever the hell you want, even if it kills people you're fine." No company is going to take the millions of dollars worth of precautions necessary to prevent things like that.