Two fascinating articles. I agree with Marcus Ranum, it is interesting how in Feynman’s “Personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle” highlights the good quality of the software. Given how software is usually so bad, how did this happen? Well, it seems that NASA recognised that testing is expensive and hard, and that ‘have you tried rebooting’ is not an adequate answer to a problem. Good testing takes time, money and aggressive pursuit of something better than ‘good enough’.

Those boys at NASA clearly understand software testing. After all, it ain’t rocket science.