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I understand what you mean but no tester/developer worth their salt should say or hide behind this. Sadly, too many do. The job of the tester is to go beyond ju

I understand what you mean but no tester/developer worth their salt should say or hide behind this. Sadly, too many do. The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain. And oh, no idea how Boeing missed it but some Indian companies are just not worth the bother. HCL, TCS, Cognizant, Infosys included. But hey, they're cheap!

mannykannot 7y ago
> The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain. So these testers should have been test pilots? - because the interaction of MCAS and the difficulty in manual trimming was not going to be found until someone tried it in the air (there is considerable doubt as to whether simulators accurately model it.) And if this was the tester's job, what was the job of the engineers at Boeing who decided on using MCAS to solve a problem, and those at the FAA who endorsed it?
- anon121212 7y ago
  You obviously missed my point, so kindly re-read my comment, particularly the part about the entire chain. Everyone involved is responsible for the deaths of innocent lives. Testers are at the end of the chain and have the power of approving or halting the deployment but the ones working for these inferior companies don't put on their thinking caps because they're just incapable of doing so. They test the spec and collect the check.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    I read and understood your original point, and that is what I disagree with. You have made a general point about responsibility, but my point is that if we look at the specifics of this particular issue, one cannot expect software testers to anticipate the particular risks that MCAS presented. On the other hand, there are other roles in the airplane development process where the people involved are expected to have the requisite knowledge to identify and judge such risks, and these are employees of Boeing or the FAA (if it turns out that these roles were farmed out to low-bidding subcontractors, that's a separate issue.) These domain experts ruled that MCAS was acceptable as designed, apparently largely on the mistaken grounds that MCAS failure is just like any other trim runaway excursion, a mistake exacerbated by the failure to properly communicate the increased power of the redesigned MCAS among the domain experts. No sound root-cause analysis will come to the conclusion that the crashes resulted from Boeing contracting out software testing to low-bid contractors. You are making the fallacy of arguing a general point that does not apply in this specific case.

mannykannot 7y ago

> The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain. So these testers should have been test pilots? - because the interaction of MCAS and the difficulty in manual trimming was not going to be found until someone tried it in the air (there is considerable doubt as to whether simulators accurately model it.) And if this was the tester's job, what was the job of the engineers at Boeing who decided on using MCAS to solve a problem, and those at the FAA who endorsed it?

anon121212 7y ago
You obviously missed my point, so kindly re-read my comment, particularly the part about the entire chain. Everyone involved is responsible for the deaths of innocent lives. Testers are at the end of the chain and have the power of approving or halting the deployment but the ones working for these inferior companies don't put on their thinking caps because they're just incapable of doing so. They test the spec and collect the check.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  I read and understood your original point, and that is what I disagree with. You have made a general point about responsibility, but my point is that if we look at the specifics of this particular issue, one cannot expect software testers to anticipate the particular risks that MCAS presented. On the other hand, there are other roles in the airplane development process where the people involved are expected to have the requisite knowledge to identify and judge such risks, and these are employees of Boeing or the FAA (if it turns out that these roles were farmed out to low-bidding subcontractors, that's a separate issue.) These domain experts ruled that MCAS was acceptable as designed, apparently largely on the mistaken grounds that MCAS failure is just like any other trim runaway excursion, a mistake exacerbated by the failure to properly communicate the increased power of the redesigned MCAS among the domain experts. No sound root-cause analysis will come to the conclusion that the crashes resulted from Boeing contracting out software testing to low-bid contractors. You are making the fallacy of arguing a general point that does not apply in this specific case.