Originally Posted by
WHBM
This just reminds me of one of our own programmers' responses to a fault issue. "Works As Coded". Well of course it Works As Coded. All computer programs do. But the coding is fundamentally wrong.
I think it would probably be more accurate to say that the design, requirements and/or verification were fundamentally wrong. As far as we know, at this point, the implementation -- the actual MCAS coding -- resulted in the system doing exactly what the coders were told to make it do -- which, under the perfectly-foreseeable but apparently unforeseen conditions of the two accident flights was to fly airplanes into the ground. This may seem like nitpicking but, in an environment where a large number of people who may not ever meet or even know about each other are involved in development, it's crucial to understand where in the process the fatal flaws were introduced and where they were missed.
It's very unlikely, for instance, that the actual code monkeys, either in-house or outsource/contracted, decided on their own initiative to take input from a single AoA vane. Software and systems architects are responsible for decisions at that level. And
very senior people are responsible for decisions such as trying to address airframe design issues with software fixes.