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Comment by Xirdus | Hacker News Reader

The joke about software developers refusing to enter an airplane running their own code dates back at least 30 years.

Software engineering is unique in STEM in that it has nearly zero regulations. Nobody keeps anybody accountable for quality and there are never any legal consequences. No other STEM jobs is like that, usually there are thousand hoops to jump through to do anything non-standard, but in software there's nothing. You can literally go to prison for forging an aircraft maintenance log, but you can forge JIRA logs to your heart's content and never get prosecuted (at most your employer can sue you for damages but that's it).

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That's not a valid comparison.

A Jira log is not part of a Quality Management System (QMS). An aircraft maintenance log is. If you fake data in the QMS, software or not, for a regulated industry, I can assure you that it won't be taken lightly by the regulators.

Try forging the software validation test records for that airplane's flight control system and see what happens.

Hopefully something happens a lot quicker than with volkswagon!

My point is exactly that there's no such thing as legally required quality management system for software. And that's what makes software development uniquely shitty in terms of not having documentation or following written instructions, to a degree unseen in any other STEM discipline. Trying to explain lack of knowledge transfer in aviation industry by putting it in terms of software industry was the worst possible analogy out of all analogies that could conceivably be made on this subject.

Forging software validation records isn't illegal because you're forging documents regarding software, but because you're forging documents regarding an airplane. Nobody gives a flying fuck about forged records for software that isn't installed on any airplane. It's not the act of forging that's illegal, but the act of installing forged software on a real airplane. Unlike the airplane repair records, where forgery is a crime in and of itself even if the airplane never flies.

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