Modest Expectations

From Chapter 2: The Mythical Man-Month

Excerpt
This then is the demythologizing of the man-month. The number of months of a project depends upon its sequential constraints. The maximum number of men depends upon the number of independent subtasks. From these two quantities one can derive schedules using fewer men and more months. One cannot, however, get workable schedules using more men and fewer months. More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined. (p. 26.)

With those words, Brooks wraps up the pseudonymous chapter of his classic text. If there is any law for managing a software project, it's Brooks' Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. The mechanism is well understood and the basic concept broadly accepted—for decades. And yet, in program after program and project after project, the law is re-proven as if it was a traditional student experiment in a first year college lab.

I'm reminded of Santayana's often cited admonition:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness...when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. "¹

If you think about it, not all history is repeated. We're particular good at repeating the mistakes. Why not the successes? How does that happen? Specifically, how does it happen in NASA?

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The the other night, I was having dinner with my good friend 'TJ'. He was reminding me just how cool it is to work for NASA. People are living in space. A rover is driving around on Mars. We are getting images of exoplanets. His enthusiasm was genuine and infectious.

International Space Station (May 2011)

He's right of course. These things are cool, but they seemed tepid compared to what NASA did during the Apollo era. Is driving a Martian rover 100 yards comparable to walking on the moon? Does the first space walk compare vaporizing a Martian rock? Does the return of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM)and re-docking of the LEM after a moon walk compare to the maiden docking of Dragon Module?

Back then NASA engineering was breaking new ground. No longer. We build spacecraft the same way we did 30 years ago. The new systems are still fragile and expensive to operate. And what about the ongoing existential crisis regarding the purpose and value of the spacestation. Does it make sense to spend more than $3B per year to keep astronauts on board to see if vegetables will grown in space? Is this headed anywhere? What's happened to the agency vision?

Later that week, I met my good friend, 'KN' for lunch. We had worked together on many tasks and shared disappointments from working on the wrong side of the political equation. That day he was surprisingly optimistic. He seemed to think that, at long last, a meaningful change was at hand. His project has committed to use model-based engineering techniques.

Over the years we'd seen similar decisions come and go. 'KN' is an old pro, no Pollyanna. Perhaps this time it would be different. Perhaps this was no mere lip service. Perhaps when the coding starts, these new techniques will actually be used. This was a glimmer of hope. But, as I thought back on the effort needed to obtain management consent for this small innovation, I wondered why significant engineering advancements for a NASA were merely routine decisions elsewhere.

What was imagined in the 1970s

Back in the 70's, expectations were different; great achievements were expected. NASA was confident and flush with success. Routine and cost effective access to space was surely in reach. NASA built the shuttle. In order to travel past the Moon and beyond, we needed a jumping off place. NASA started work on a space station. These were bold objectives. Humans were about to push into the frontiers of space and NASA was in the lead.

That's when the setbacks started. The shuttle was delivered 2 years late. There was a tragic accident. The space station project became a muddle and nearly abandoned. NASA had overreached. Doubt crept into the culture. By the late '80s the Agency's growing conservatism slowed the pace of innovation. The engineering values shifted to predictability, risk reduction, and cost savings. Along the way, something changed—expectations were no longer great.

In the last decade the government tried to reenergize NASA with the Constellation Program (Cx). The goal of Cx was to return to the Moon and enable travel to Mars. From the outset, the program was cursed by an unrealistic funding profile, a fanciful schedule, and the rigid bureaucracy that sprouted since the glory years. The result: Cx floundered for 5 years before being mercifully cancelled. However, despite these crippling constraints, Cx did leave a legacy in the Orion Multipupose Crew Vehicle , the Space Launch System and the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. These programs produced sensible vehicles that are basically Apollo-era recreations with modest improvements. Modest; sensible; but not especially inspiring.

The new Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle

Aside from occasionally bouncing or dangling rovers to the surface of Mars, the Agency's technical feats do little to animate the public's imagination. Now-a-days, it is the high-tech rainmakers, and not NASA, that feed the public's space appetite. Commercial space tourism companies tout the glories of a sub-orbital dip into space. Space cults recruit romantics who are clamoring to board a one-way trip to Mars. There are raft of grandiose projects, like space elevators and asteroid trappers, whose proponents proclaim their practicality with only the slightest consideration of the potential for complication.

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It is this drift away from a culture of inspired, innovative engineering that is telling. Both 'TJ' and 'KN' are realists. They are professional. They are not complacent. They have internalized what's possible in the engineering culture of NASA.

Internalization of culture is a key to NASA's repetition of merely modest and just sensible engineering achievements. I saw a transformation in nearly every new hire. Most come on-board agonizingly eager, talented, and bubbling with ideas. They know little of the realities of engineering in the space business. In a few years most absorb the conventional wisdoms that engineering judgment rests on current practice and innovation lies on the borders of the status quo. They learn that engineering between the lines is the mark of professionalism. The result is an inward-looking, myopic culture busy with immediate concerns and reluctant to tamper engineering custom—even when that custom is to add programmers to address schedule problems late in the project.

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"Spider" concept for spaces station
 built from Shuttle hardware

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what the are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.²—Whitehead

We are rewarded for internalizing the conventional assumptions and practicing the conventional methods. The problems occur when the circumstances,that gave rise to a convention,are no longer relevant. Knowing history is not enough to avoid the errors of the past.

I'd like to think I'm an optimist—perhaps one whose hope has been attenuated by disappointment. I don't believe we must repeat history or be mastered by convention. We can question fundamental assumptions. We can develop new approaches that will enable us to build the systems that were imagined in the 70's. If only a few remain tough minded and work to think past the assumed truths, 40 years from now the next generation will look back at the Mythical Man-Month and say: "It's a good thing we don't do THAT anymore."

With that, I'll move on to the next chapter: "Surgical Team."

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^1. Santayana, G., "Reason in Common Sense," The Life of Reason. Dover Publications Inc. 1980. Vol 1. Chapter 12, page 291.
^2. A.N. Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. Free Press Paperpack. 1925. p.48.