In Coders at Work, Peter Norvig quotes NASA administrator Don Goldin saying

We’ve got to do the better, faster, cheaper. These space missions cost too much. It’d be better to run more missions and some of them would fail but overall we’d still get more done for the same amount of money.

NASA has extremely rigorous processes for writing software. They supposedly develop bug-free code; I doubt that’s true, thought I’m sure they do have exceptionally low bug rates. But this quality comes at a high price. Rumor has it that space shuttle software costs $1,500 per line to develop. When asked about the price tag, Norvig said “I don’t know if it’s optimal. I think they might be better off with buggy software.” At some point it’s certainly not optimal. If it doubles the price of a project to increase your probability of a successful mission from 98% to 99%, it’s not worth it; you’re better off running two missions with a 98% chance of success each.

Few people understand that software quality is all about probabilities of errors. Most people think the question is whether you’d rather have bug-free software or buggy software. I’d rather have bug-free software, thank you. But bug-free is not an option. Nothing humans do is perfect. All we can do is lower the probabilities of bugs. But as the probability of bugs goes to zero, the development costs go to infinity. (Actually it’s not all about probabilities of errors. It’s also about the consequences of errors. Sending back a photo with a few incorrect pixels is not the same as crashing a probe.)

Norvig’s comment makes sense regarding unmanned missions. But what about manned missions? Since one of the possible consequences of error is loss of life, the stakes are obviously higher. But does demanding flawless software increase the probability of a safe mission? One of the consequences of demanding extremely high quality software is that some tasks are too expensive to automate and so humans have to be trained to do those tasks. But astronauts make mistakes just as programmers do. If software has a smaller probability of error than an astronaut would have for a given task, it would be safer to rely on the software.

Related post: Software in space