Comment by Veserv

Thank you for providing a more thorough and complete technical explanation.

As you can see from my final statement, I made no argument that it was not a travesty. It was ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. This is not a defense of their inadequacy.

I was pointing out how it is absolutely incorrect to claim that it was a "stupid mistake". That argument is used by people implicitly arguing that "If only Boeing used modern software development practices like Microsoft/Google/Crowdstrike/[insert big software company here] then they would have never introduced such problems". That is asinine. As can be seen from your explanation, the problem is multi-faceted requiring numerous design failures in both implementation, integration, and incentives. In fact, the problems are even more subtle and pernicious than in my original explanation that was derived from high level summaries rather than the investigation reports themselves.

I do not know if this has changed in the last few years, but at Microsoft you were required to have 1 whole randomly-selected person, with no required domain expertise, say they gave your code, in isolation, a spot check before it could be added. This is the same process applied regardless of code criticality, as they do not even has a process to classify code by criticality. This is viewed as a extraordinary level of process and quality control that most could only dream of achieving. Truly if only Boeing threw out whatever they were doing and adopted such heavyweight process by "best-in-class" software development houses they would have discovered and fixed the 737 MAX problems.

Boeing does not need to adopt modern software development "best practices" and whatever crap they use at Microsoft/[insert big software company here] that introduces bugs faster than ant queens. The processes in play that created the 737 MAX already make Microsoft and its peers look like children eating glue, but they are inadequate for the job of making safe aerospace software and systems. What Boeing needs to do is re-adopt their old practices that make the 737 MAX development processes look like a child eating glue. The 737 MAX was not stupid, it was inadequate. BOTH ARE UNACCEPTABLE, but the fix is different.