| Mission-Critical Eidola | ||
|
The Case for MC Eidola (pdf, LaTeX) |
Mission-Critical? | |
|
On this site, "mission critical" does not have the broad "this software must work or the
vice president will be mad" meaning in general use in the software industry.
By mission-critical, we mean "this software must work or babies will die" --
we're talking about programs that fly airplanes or regulate medical equipment.
Such software goes through a rigorous design and verification process unknown to the mainstream software industry. It is a very tedious process, in which human factors such as confusion, boredom, and oversight are deadly problems -- problems which are aggravated by the very nature of source code. Eidola has the potential to combat these human factors in a number of ways, and make mission-critical software development substantially quicker and cheaper. This could bring some of the benefits and insights of mission-critical development into the failure-plagued software mainstream. Nick makes this argument in his fascinating treatise on this subject, which will be of interest not only to developers of mission-critical systems, but to everyone who wishes that software would actually work, damnit! | ||
| Status | ||
|
Nick's argument for the importance of MC Eidola
is now available, and highly recommended!
The special mission-critical version is a long way off; however, the issues that Nick raises are informing design in other parts of the project. I have created the mission-critical section of the site in anticipation of future work devoted particularly to MC Eidola. | ||
| Copyright 2000-2001 Paul Cantrell | ||