Sounds like a lot of the conflict is the old Agile vs Waterfall debate. Waterfall isn't very well regarded in the software engineering community, but it seems t

Sounds like a lot of the conflict is the old Agile vs Waterfall debate. Waterfall isn't very well regarded in the software engineering community, but it seems to work much better in the Aerospace community, especially for stuff like flight control avionics. I think the difference is that Waterfall is actually a better solution - as long as you actually know all of your requirements ahead of time, and they will actually never change. This may be the case in for embedded stuff like avionics, but is almost never actually the case for more business-like software that automates or assists with human processes, which is what Air Traffic Control actually is. So it kinda sounds like they used a traditional aerospace Waterfall project plan, but the requirements gathering was a total fail. Sounds like they need a team more experienced in Agile development, even though it has more of a reputation for putting things into production before they've been really carefully tested. Of course, this is based off a lot of shaky assumptions from a vague article, so who knows.