jon@cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky) (07/21/90)
In article <1990Jul17.123502.1639@IDA.ORG>, bryk@IDA.ORG (Bill Brykczynski) writes: > Could anyone provide me with references to documents describing > the Apollo space program from a software point of view? Specifically, > I am interested in the software testing approach used. I have > heard that the operational software was "brute force" tested, > labor intensive, and expensive. LOC, lifecycle cost breakdown, > error rates, etc. would be useful. > > Thanks in advance, > > bill brykczynski > bryk@ida.org I am aware of three references. None of these provides the detail Bill asks, but they may provide leads. In particular, Ceruzzi's book has a lot of references and a good bibliography. (it isn't at hand at the moment so I can't check now) J.D. Aron, "Apollo programming support", pps. 181-186 in SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: CONCEPTS AND TECHNIQUES ed. J.M. Buxton, Peter Naur, and Brian Randell, Petrocelli/Charter 1976, New York. This is actually a transcript of a brief talk and discussion at the 1969 NATO Science Committee Meeting on Software Engineering in Rome. Aron appears to be talking about the ground support system, not the flight system. He mentions that the project ranged from 300 to 600 people at the Houston site, at the peak about half were programmers and half were administrators and support. There is a lot of interesting history and anecdote in this book. It also contains material from the first NATO conference at Garmisch in 1968, generally regarded as the first ever meeting on software engineering, I think they originated the term for that occassion. There are other versions of the proceedings of those conferences than the Buxton et al book. Joseph M. Fox, SOFTWARE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT, Prentice-Hall, 1982. Fox was a top manager at IBM Federal Systems Group involved in the Apollo/Skylab effort. He says it occupied 700 people for 7 years at Houston (p. xiii); the contract was valued at $209 million, generated 23 million instructions, and consumed 6,000+ man years (Table 4-10, p. 67). Also I find a graph in Norman R. Augustine's AUGUSTINE'S LAWS, Viking 1986 (Fig. 23, p. 117) which Augustine credits to Barry Boehm (it's probably in Boehm's SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ECONOMICS). It seems to show Apollo 7 carrying about 50,000 bytes and Apollo 11 carrying about 80,000 (this sounds too high for the onboard computers of that time to me) and about 5 million lines of ground support software for Apollo. Quite a different figure from Fox. The latest reference is Paul Ceruzzi's BEYOND THE LIMITS: FLIGHT ENTERS THE COMPUTER AGE, MIT Press, 1989. Highly recommended. As noted above, the references therein may help you. I've cross-posted this reply to sci.space. I, too, would be interested to learn more about this. - Jon Jacky, University of Washington, Seattle jon@gaffer.rad.washington.edu
hubcap@hubcap.clemson.edu (System Janitor) (07/21/90)
Who has last winter's USENIX procedings? A NASA bigwig was the keynote speaker there, and he had lots to say on the subject. -Mike
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (07/21/90)
In article <9778@hubcap.clemson.edu> hubcap@hubcap.clemson.edu (System Janitor) writes: >Who has last winter's USENIX procedings? A NASA bigwig was the keynote >speaker there, and he had lots to say on the subject. Keynote speeches almost never end up in published proceedings, and this one was no exception. -- NFS: all the nice semantics of MSDOS, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology and its performance and security too. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop) (07/23/90)
[Note Followup-To: above. Just a hint.] In article Mike <9778@hubcap.clemson.edu> (System Janitor) writes: >Who has last winter's USENIX procedings? A NASA bigwig was the keynote >speaker there, and he had lots to say on the subject [of the software used >on the Apollo space program]. Too true. Entertaining, as well, although the material gave the impression of having been trotted out in front of many audiences before it reached the assembled hackers of USENIX. The speaker was Jim Tomayko, Software Engineering Institute, CMU. Sadly, one of the things that makes keynotes different from the rest of a conference is that they don't get written up in the proceedings, so there's no point in asking. And I'm pretty sure that USENIX (unlike, say, UniForum) doesn't publish conference tapes, so you can't order up a cassette and listen to it as you drive to the spaceport (or whatever). -- Dominic Dunlop