[LordHog]

In the various industries I have worked in DO-178B, industrial controls/IEC-61508, and storage the one consistency shared by managers is meeting schedules and milestones. Generally, a manager's insight to development/engineering is for the product to be just good enough. Developers/engineers have a tendency to over engineer the solution. Good peer reviews have the most influence on software quality as does independent testing. Managers rarely have little impact that I have witness over my 25 year career, thus far. For industries that adhere to DO-178B or IEC-61508 guidelines, it is the process that imbues greatly improved quality.

[airbreather]

Yep, 61508 is basically a specialized form of IS0 9000 quality management.

And independent testing really makes a difference, I am trying to introduce automated testing into my company at the moment, they still spend a month with buttons and lights testing a safety system.

I have been getting blank looks when I ask how they test for single scan events like this. But I know of several industrial incidents resulting from common single scan software design failures in safety systems (usually order of execution issues, but sometimes the flitter logic of oneshots is the cuplrit).

One single scan incident in particular was from equipment in service for over 10 years, and then the stars suddenly aligned and the resulting software failure event ended up costing a big miner well over a billion dollars.

[ncmncm]

I have frequently seen standards, guidelines, and "process" prevent improvements to code. Since change is considered risky, it takes more time and effort to document improvement than the individual change is worth.

But software improves, when it does, by a series of small changes, each by itself hardly worth doing, but in sum producing a wholly better product.

It is the process that turned lizards into birds.

[WalterBright]

Businesses would not employ expensive managers if the dev teams worked better without them.