In general it is assumed that documentation is the boring part and paying attention to it is a sign of quality. But where do you put people who prefer writing and/or teaching to thinking long and deep about product issues ?
Perhaps the biggest issue with the 737 MAX was lack of documentation. Boeing consciously chose to completely omit several new features (most notoriously MCAS) from the pilot manuals in order to make it seems like nothing important was changed that would require retraining 737 NG pilots on a simulator.
In a sense, this is far worse than what most tech companies do since it is a life-and-death issue and Boeing has made a very conscious effort to hide details here, rather than just being lazy.
One could say that "the point" of MCAS was to be an implementation detail, something that you would often deliberately hide from software documentation so that users don't design around internal details.
There's something of a history of aerospace vendors omitting "implementation details" that end up contributing to serious accidents (e.g. if you get an Airbus far enough out of the normal envelope protections, you lose stall warning), and an equally sordid history of flight and maintenance crews improvising procedures to the observed (rather than designed/specified) behavior of aircraft systems.
Arguably, the single biggest systematic risk in the current pilot training system is that crews overlearn to the implementation details of their training, rather than the actual principles and flight manuals (e.g. training inadvertently training for quick engine shutdowns, when the consequences of shutting down the wrong engine in reality are much more serious).
> There's something of a history of aerospace vendors omitting "implementation details" that end up contributing to serious accidents (e.g. if you get an Airbus far enough out of the normal envelope protections, you lose stall warning),
And Airbus control laws and protections are well defined and studied by pilots training for them.
You encourage them to blog about it and you aggregate the posts into documentation - somehow. (I'm sure there's people for that, or an AI, or something). They had to explain it when they implemented it - explain it on a post. Confluence. Somewhere.
I've read one of the manuals for the 787 management software stack, and it was... beautiful. It read like a novel. I read it twice on the train for the simple pleasure of it.
No they don't. Just last week I was looking for something, found a Google result from Microsoft's docs, but opening it resulted in a page saying they're moving docs around, this one isn't being moved, fuck off. No content, no link to the content.
