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I work on a project for a Japanese university which is of comparable complexity, at least in kloc size, to the Space Shuttle.

It most definitively does not have only one bug in it per release.

However, and this is a pretty key concept: we don't bill them half a billion a year for it. (Not everybody, after all, has access to a virtually unlimited slush fund whose primary purpose is to line the pockets of defense contractors in a PR-friendly way.)

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And money is not the critical constraint: the groups $35 million per year budget

I think you may have gotten your numbers confused. They get $35m for a group of 260 people to write the software, not half a billion.

Ugh, my bad. After a 16 hour day in the salt mines I was not doing math right.

I spent it, incidentally, supervising an outsourcing team which can't read the language the project is written in -- I kid you not, I actually had to say "Thank you for your inquiry about unknown red text under the login screen. The red text you have circled is not an error message. It is a weather report. The text is red because the forecast is potentially lethal. Closing as 'By Design'."

I have to ask. What kind of weather is potentially lethal, and common enough that your software accounts for it?!

Ever wondered to yourself "Hey, why am I using Japanese words for typhoon and tsunami?"

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