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Spacecraft Design

Akin’s laws of spacecraft design (Google cache, another copy), by David Akin, a professor at the University of Maryland is a remarkable collection collected over the years Mr. Akin worked in the field of Spacecraft Design. These are all very good laws, most of which are applicable to many different professions.

Here’s my personal pick for the laws that apply to management.

• At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.
• When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.
• There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.
• The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.
• Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.
• A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
• ( And the BEST OF THEM ALL:) It’s called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

For programmers, most of us don’t make systems that can potentially kill people, due to errors. We should consider ourselves to be lucky we are not doctors or aircraft engineers. These guys don’t get the luxury of "trial and error" or "compile and re-compile" like we do. Still, atleast do a mental design, come up with an algorithm, validate that algorithm, write pseudo-code and only then start coding, to reduce mistakes. Still better, use Python for making your pseudo-code and production code same.

While I was in college, computers were not as popular as it is now. We had to prepare the flowchart, pseudo-code and the actual code on our workbooks before we set foot in the computer lab. We were not even supposed to get compilation errors after typing in the code from paper to the computer (good old unix VT100 terminals). I guess, it all boils down to proper planning, organized thinking and review.