> The whole Silicon Valley is like that.
Well yes, and this enables making all the stuff that we have now like Google, YouTube or ChatGPT. If those things were developed with NASA approach to code quality, we might never have had them.
Well yes, and this enables making all the stuff that we have now like Google, YouTube or ChatGPT. If those things were developed with NASA approach to code quality, we might never have had them.
What matters is not the process, but the result. For example, SpaceX are using iterative approach in their design and they now have the most reliable rocket in history.
The top comment in this thread seems to imply that "NASA" approach is inherently better, especially for safety-critical applications. My view is that from the point of view of safety, the approach doesn't really matter and what matters is the results, i.e. reliability. At the same time from the point of view of development velocity iterative approach is clearly better.
In case of the sunk submarine, it seems that the company followed iterative, "SpaceX" approach, but they didn't actually iterate enough to make their sub seaworthy.
But you won't know the 'results' until you have a catastrophe and can do a post-mortem and find out where you went wrong. The approach does matter because one approach is 'let's do everything we can to prevent the catastrophe'. I mean, the approach is safety.
I'd argue this is in fact superior to NASA's approach, which rarely allows for uncrewed testing (and spectacular RUDs), leading to technological stagnation and catastrophic organizational risks. (i.e. internal resistance to doing anything about the O-ring problem on Challenger, even though they had been alerted about the potential issue).
Second, it's all very well "iterating until you succeed" but that's not a good approach when live humans are involved in the iterating. "Move fast and break things" is not the same as "move fast and break people". Space X, after all, had to prove a certain level of reliability before NASA let them fly people to ISS.
Google doesn't need belt and suspenders development, human safety systems usually do.