"Chaotic Architecture" At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

New submitter CarlaRudder writes: NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is ditching old, rigid, legacy tools and adopting a much more flexible approach that allows people within the company to pick and choose the technologies that help them do their jobs better. CIO Jim Rinaldi and IT Chief Technology Officer Tom Soderstrom are calling it "chaotic architecture," and they are using it to better prepare for change and to attract the next generation of IT talent to JPL.

Comments

Re:Sounds scary, but it makes sense.

[vux984]

I agree with everything you said. However, there is the other side of it too:

'chaotic architecture' could just as easily be the state where users are given control and IT has to support whatever nonsense users want. We've all seen it. Company goes "BYOD" and "chaotic architecture" follows... every piece of crap random consumer grade device gets brought in... half of it doesn't run the business critical apps properly, centrally managed A/V isn't possible, virus infections run rampant and IT finds itself working on some twits $300 Sony Vaio with 1GB RAM and Vista Home Basic... torrent software consumes all bandwidth. Some nimrod installs an inkjet color printer that's only compatible with XP, then buys a Windows 8 laptop and wants IT to make it work...

IT needs to facilitate users getting the tools they need, WITHOUT letting it get TOO chaotic. :)

They're ditching telemetry data as well

[Thing 1]

Apparently they are also ditching old, rigid, legacy telemetry data from the Apollo missions. They "lost" the tapes. All 14,000 of them!

NASA is a bunch of liars. Slashdot's fortune is apt: "The trouble with a lot of self-made men is that they worship their creator."

Certainly, not the creator of the firmament that the shuttle is (possibly) designed to penetrate.

Re:How do they defend against Ruby and NoSQL?

[Anonymous Coward]

JPL doesn't use a lot of Ruby and NoSQL.. most of what we develop for spacecraft is in plain old C and some C++. Science data processing is often FORTRAN, because there's an enormous legacy base of processing codes in FORTRAN.

More python recently. Some LISP in days gone by. Some Java.. some enterprise apps (payroll, etc.) are Java against an Oracle back end.

Re: Sounds scary, but it makes sense.

[JaredOfEuropa]

It doesn't mean to just let everyone use whatever they want; you still need oversight, from your peers as well as your manager. And good individual choices can (and should) at some point be incorporated into company guidelines.

I've worked with software that came from a "chaotic" environment. When it came to fixing bugs, there was a lot more moaning about "why the hell did he do that?!" compared to software developed against corporate standards, however the time and cost of fixing a bug were similar for both types of software. When it comes to adding enhancements, I found that the success factor was not having a company standard software architecture, but a good one. Software developed by a lone but clever developer entirely doing his own thing turned out to be easily enhanced due to outstanding software architecture. Software developed to company standards was equally maintainable if the standards were good enough, however in many cases one would find that the standards were applied poorly, or were themselves incomplete, leading to poorly structured and hard-to-maintain software. Again, in the end it comes down to people