Integer Overflow Bug in Boeing 787 Dreamliner
Might be time to remove working on the 787 from my resume. I feel like the poor thing has been one disaster after another in the news.<p>I can't speak to the quality of the A and B level (most critical) code, but the development process for the C level software I was working on definitely could have used a lot of improvement. Messy code, tests and documentation were an afterthought/checkbox item, etc. The incentives were just wrong.<p>I think there's a ton of room for process innovation in avionics software development. One thing I wanted to build for a long time was a tool for tracing. In theory, every industry requirement (DO-178B, etc) was supposed to trace to a hight level Software Design Document (SDD) requirement, which was supposed to trace to a Software Requirements Document (SRD) requirement, which would trace to a code function. We maintained all of that BY HAND. It was a huge mess. Perfect example of something that could have been an extremely valuable development tool, but ended up just being a hassle to try and maintain.<p>Then of course there's language choice. C is king, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly not the safest, even in the restricted forms used in avionics. Sadly, my very first ever project as a programmer was porting an Ada codebase to C for the 787 (off by one errors for days...). It's almost cliche to say nowadays, but I would be really excited to see Rust gain some traction in avionics over the next 20 years or so. Because that's how far behind avionics is. We were using Visual Studio 6 in 2011!