3 ms·

> As software people I think many will laugh at the low TRL of their own work. It isn't too bad or anything since other sectors need to move fast (probably secu

> As software people I think many will laugh at the low TRL of their own work. It isn't too bad or anything since other sectors need to move fast (probably security people will disagree). But other sectors need to move slow and ensure that things don't break. Because things breaking means people dying. I doubt more than 5% of developers have ever worked on anything beyond a TRL4. SREs, maybe,

danjayh 8y ago
Typically, everything in civil aviation is done to DO-178C. Almost everything we work on is level A, the highest level of criticality. Military stuff is generally much less rigorous, believe it or not.
- akiselev 8y ago
  The issue isn't the actual certification, it's the rapidly changing requirements and the standard for testing most software. There's plenty of libraries and tools I'd colloquially consider TRL 8 or 9 but there are tens, sometimes thousands, of people who can make a change to that software and push an update to millions of systems with little more than a glance from an SRE running `apt-get upgrade.` The nature of network facing software even requires you balance the need to keep your infrastructure stable with the need to keep it secure so you're always stuck in a loop between customers, support, management, developers, and operations where everything constantly changes. Once software is operational, whether you are following DO-178x/33x, FDA's General Principles of Software Validation and other guidelines, ISO-whatever, or NASA/military TRL, there's a whole ton of stuff you have to do to make any changes once you reach a certain point in development. Since most businesses have the benefit of captive employees that can be woken up in the middle of hte night and terra-locked systems, they never even come close to reaching that point.

3 ms·

> As software people I think many will laugh at the low TRL of their own work. It isn't too bad or anything since other sectors need to move fast (probably secu

by akiselev 8y ago

danjayh 8y ago
Typically, everything in civil aviation is done to DO-178C. Almost everything we work on is level A, the highest level of criticality. Military stuff is generally much less rigorous, believe it or not.
- akiselev 8y ago
  The issue isn't the actual certification, it's the rapidly changing requirements and the standard for testing most software. There's plenty of libraries and tools I'd colloquially consider TRL 8 or 9 but there are tens, sometimes thousands, of people who can make a change to that software and push an update to millions of systems with little more than a glance from an SRE running `apt-get upgrade.` The nature of network facing software even requires you balance the need to keep your infrastructure stable with the need to keep it secure so you're always stuck in a loop between customers, support, management, developers, and operations where everything constantly changes. Once software is operational, whether you are following DO-178x/33x, FDA's General Principles of Software Validation and other guidelines, ISO-whatever, or NASA/military TRL, there's a whole ton of stuff you have to do to make any changes once you reach a certain point in development. Since most businesses have the benefit of captive employees that can be woken up in the middle of hte night and terra-locked systems, they never even come close to reaching that point.