Opinion The International Space Station is showing its age. More than two and a half billion people, more than one-third of the total population, have never known before the existence of human orbit.
Bits and pieces continue to go wrong, most recently Eva’s spacesuits; Russia may or may not bail out; And when it comes to space germs, it’s more Red Dwarf than Enterprise.
Have you ever thought that it is difficult to find a cleaner to come to your apartment in the city? On the one hand, it’s outdated, extremely expensive to run, doesn’t contribute much to space exploration, and consumes too many space engineers’ brain time.
Does that apply to any older technologies you know? IT legacies don’t do cool videos of Earth from space or astronauts in microgravity, so they lose out significantly on the public relations front with the ISS. They don’t eat 15 percent of the $22 billion budget. [PDF] Or.
The most important difference between ISS and your line-of-business application is that ISS, running on virtualized Windows XP (which still has over 0.3 percent market share, for heaven’s sake), is a project designed to die. NASA plans to destroy it in the next five to eight years [PDF].
Along with headlines such as scientific research and technological testing – there are thousands of results we can enjoy – the world respects the work of the ISS because it uses the experience of long-duration crewed missions. On the space roadmap, the ISS misses the shuttle missile bridge and returns to the moon and beyond.
When we next go from inward to outward orbit (the ISS will crash into the Pacific Ocean, apparently), the reason will be due to the legacy of the ISS.
Legacy IT can play an equally valued role in organizational long-term planning. It doesn’t. No one thinks in these terms. If you’re very, very lucky, they might even be somewhat up-to-date documents of the lone whisper for posterity (you won’t be very, very lucky).
Once the work is done, project life cycles become more myth than management. Does anyone ask at the beginning of a project, “What do we expect to learn by building and running this, and how do we take that knowledge forward?” It is not part of tradition or general practice.
But the fact that such ideas seem more alien than ‘Oumuamua is nothing more than a case of severe amnesia in which corporations are so eager to reinvent themselves that they forget biological evolution.
And it is. yours Bugs, IT professionals, and your determination to keep the science in computer science fiction. Adopt the agile software development methodology.
The idea first took a firm shape with rules and logic in 1990.
He identified rigorously consistent project planning issues, had a great track record of demystifying jargon outside of software, and delved into DevOps and the cloud. You can easily find a lot of discussion about how well he did these things, how long it’s taken, and what strengths and weaknesses he’s been exposed to for two decades. What they fail to find is an attempt to analyze what Agile has taught us about software engineering and project management in its own terms or in terms of the entire history of software.
Our capabilities in science and technology are not progressing in a linear fashion, more good at each step. Many fashionable ideas, however good they may seem, are rarely mentioned since they no longer correspond to moderation in polite society. But do we learn from these failures in a shared narrative?
Even the software has its fashion failures: Java everywhere, anyone? And the deprecated one can be picked up as well (JavaScript, yo). But what does this mean for the future?
There is no shortage of discussion about every aspect of the fabric of our digital world; Because coherent intellectual analysis lacks emotion. It’s like Anglophone politics, where any tradition of intellectual analysis has been abandoned for warmth.
Even something as dramatic and profound as the rise of open source and Internet co-dependence has received less academic attention than the prehistory of ant parasitology. Yet there is no part of business or culture untouched by the past.
The ISS can be built and operated because science, technology and engineering have their identity as disciplines that have a life span of 30 years. Such is the legacy of prosperity and progress.
In IT, the term legacy is a symbol of shame and technical debt because we’ve lost the mental work of properly disciplining it. As we move into the 21st century with the potential for bad digital, it is our responsibility to make it one of the greatest human endeavors. Serious intent is not a crime. A fiery death from above is not an option. ®
