MMT: "Any questions on that?" -- SILENCE

"James Oberg" writes:

I just listened to the NASA replay of the MMT audio tapes.

At 9:14:48 EDT after a three and half minute discussion, Linda Ham agrees
that there is no safety of flight issue, despite the absence of any test or
analysis data that a foam impact on RCC is safe -- they just assumed it
was -- and asks for any questions. The room was quiet as a tomb.

I'd think you'd want to separate your "safety board" from the mission
management team.

I've been working in software development for quite some time and have
observed that the products with higher quality tend to be those that
have a quality assurance team that's separate from the development
team. The development team is always under pressure to get projects
done on schedule. Quality often suffers because their boss only cares
that the project is released on schedule. These guys only seem to
speak in some dialect of Microsoft Project. Microsoft Project does
nothing to track quality, only schedule (I wonder if the MMT deals
with Microsoft Project).

The quality assurance team is responsible for running automated
testing, which catches some of the bugs by testing previously existing
functionality. They are also generally responsible for introducing
new tests based on the customer requirements for new projects. They
won't sign off on a project until it's clear that it has the
functionality and quality demanded by the customer. Their boss is
only concerned with quality, not schedule, so there isn't much
pressure to sign off on projects that have clearly missed their
quality goals.

Jeff
--
Remove "no" and "spam" from email address to reply.
If it says "This is not spam!", it's surely a lie.