Third Foundation

weird knock on "agile" here, since keeping technical debt low was a by-product of TDD and Refactoring, and worked in harmony with hardware development by savvy teams.

"This architectural discipline is increasingly rare in modern development. Michael Riley, a team lead at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute who previously collaborated with NASA to adapt risk-assessment tools for the Orion mission, noted that while earlier generations worked within strict hardware constraints, modern mission-critical development is different.

“Modern Agile and DevOps approaches prioritize iteration, which can challenge architectural discipline,” Riley explained. “As a result, technical debt accumulates, and maintainability and system resiliency suffer.”"

Gerald M. Weinberg worked on the NASA "Mercury" software using techniques similar to test-driven-development and pair programming: "Agile' software development before the term "software engineering" had been invented.

#agile
https://cacm.acm.org/news/how-nasa-built-artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/

How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer

Communications of the ACM
Apr 8 at 9:06pmWeb
Show threadben4d ago
@rayckeith usually seems like anyone complaining about agile doesn’t understand agile and appears to be describing the exact opposite of agile. in many cases agile would be the direct solution to the problems they describe.
Show threadthezerobit3d ago
@rayckeith
I wonder how iteration challenges architectural discipline. I've worked in many agile teams, and iteration was never at odds with any disciplines, such as testing or security. Agile practices tend to layer several disciplines on top of iteration. I wonder if this comment comes from rigorous evidence, anecdotal experience, or pure speculation.
Maybe it's just difficult to fit features into short iteration loops when they require so much tight integration with redundant mechanisms?