Re: is Ada used in James Webb Space Telescope software?

[John McCabe <john@mccabe.org.uk>]

On Tuesday, 28 December 2021 at 10:59:36 UTC, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> On 2021-12-28 12:24, John McCabe wrote:
> [snip]
> > Although Nikolas mentions Matra Marconi Space mandating TLD, that 
> > would've come down from Dornier who'd apparently done a deal with 
> > TLD.
> Yes, a considerable part of our requirements came from Dornier via Matra 
> Marconi Space (France). We sometimes had fun trying to understand how 
> the French had interpreted requirements written in English by the 
> Germans. The two other languages had left their imprints on the 
> "English" wording :-)

We didn't really have that problem. On TCIU most of our requirements came from Dornier - > MMS-UK (ASAR instrument prime) - > Alcatel - > MMS-UK (TCIU team). Both MMS-UK teams were in Portsmouth. Alcatel were only there because of 'juste retour'* and they didn't even seem to bother trying to interpret the MMS-UK ASAR requirements, they just changed the front page to have "Alcatel" on it. We basically had a shed-load of requirements placed on us that had nothing to do with what the TCIU needed to do, and Alcatel never did get round to formally specifying the bit we really did need from them (the TCIU - > T/R Module - an Alcatel device - interface) as far as I can remember! 

It was good in a way, but Alcatel certainly, and possibly also Alenia, played politics all the way through. We were required to go through Alcatel to get them to clarify some of the requirements that were relevant and had come from MMS-UK. As they had no idea what they meant, Alcatel had to go to MMS-UK to get the clarification. Fortunately Alcatel appeared to want to do as little work as possible for their money so they'd just forward the clarification from MMS-UK without bothering to try to understand it. 

I'm sure lots of people have been in similar situations, but the inefficiency could've been disastrous, especially as we (the MMS-UK teams) had been working directly with each other on ASAR for years before Alcatel were put in to split us up, and we used the same canteen! 

Ah well, those were the days. Apologies for going so far off-topic, but it was nice to reminisce :-) 

* Similarly, the ASAR CESA (Central Electronics SubAssembly) requirements came Dornier - > MMS-UK - > Alenia - > MMS-UK.