Requiem to Phobos-Grunt

Yesterday, after about two months of orbiting the Earth on an intermediary, low-altitude elliptic orbit, Russian interplanetary station had finally fallen back to Earth, luckily into Pacific Ocean, not on some populated area.

Its short flight raised many questions to Roscosmos and even state's officials. Combined with several other satellite launch failures during last year, these questions are especially vital today. Maybe something in the area of top management of Roskosmos is really going wrong, maybe someone still think that world-class high-tech unique things can be developed for amount of money much less than world market suggests. Maybe something is broken at the bottom end of a technological chain, say poor quality control of production.

But here I want to point to only one side of the problem: nowadays, we have many strong rigorous math instruments that can be used to assess reliability and probability of failure for virtually any piece of hardware and software. Researches in the area of development of error-tolerant and reliable hardware and software systems allow one to employ many scientifically proved methods of designing and testing. This is XXI century, at last.

If scarce funding had really taken place, why main engineers and their bosses who were responsible for device subsystems could not just say: "Hey, guys, this is not enough to achieve the project's goals. You either will give us enough resources (time, money, people, equipment, etc.), or we will not sign for the work.". It seems that something is broken in the whole chain of decision making in Roskosmos. Sadly, but such conclusion came to mind after reading news.

CRM and Electronics/Software Development

In my spare time, I like to read one aviation forum. From there I learned that in the area of civil aviation there exists the whole concept about how members of aircraft flying crew should communicate and behave with each other, in order to achieve the best possible flying safety. I think, that something similar can be adopted to the field of electronics/software command development projects.

Crew Resource Management explanation on Wikipedia

CRM is all about preventing, detecting and correcting (even potential) human errors at the earliest possible stage, thus achieving the best flight results and safety. If you will regard flight of an aircraft as a multi-people PROJECT, you may naturally see that CRM principles can be applied also to electronics/software multi-people development PROJECTS. Unfortunately, I did not hear that even basics of such approach are studied in any university. This leads to very big role of project leader and his personal communication skills in overall success of any development project.
Such dependency could be mitigated, in my view, by working out and accepting concept of interpersonal communication in software/electronics development industry.

In particular, co-pilots are specially trained to correct the captain and to question potentially wrong decisions if it seems appropriate in a given situation. But in the area of electronics/software development, authoritarian project leader often has too much power and possibilities to send a project in totally wrong direction.