>These aren't mustache-twirling villains who distribute memos that say "Let's ignore safety issues to get this approved faster". They really believe they're doing what's best for all involved. We'll save everyone time and money, and make it easier for pilots. How is that not a good thing? We have no reason to believe safety will be compromised.
That is an incredibly naive reading of the situation. For starters, there is no such rationale as 'reason to believe,' this is a highly regulated process for good reason, which requires testing and verification.
Sure it could be true, but the far more likely motivation is along the lines of Dieselgate. And yes, it can be proven that managers make bad decisions that incur legal liability.
Naive? I worked at Boeing for a couple years, and was on a software team where I was regularly asked to do things which flew in the face of the known best practices of the industry. (My team is not to blame for this. It wasn't for the 737MAX, it wasn't avionics, and the project was cancelled long before it was at all usable.)
It's not as "highly regulated" as you might want to believe. They talk a good game about CMMI but if you try to improve something they remind you that CMMI is only about process, not quality. Hurry up and ship something (deadlines!), and if it's not perfect we'll find it in test.
Given that the company has this culture, I find it much more plausible that this is to blame for their product issues. I don't need to hypothesize a big evil conspiracy to explain bad software.
In fact, that's true of almost every software organization. The James Bond joke [1] fell flat precisely because you don't need a James Bond villain to get buggy software. It's what you get by default.
That is an incredibly naive reading of the situation. For starters, there is no such rationale as 'reason to believe,' this is a highly regulated process for good reason, which requires testing and verification.
Sure it could be true, but the far more likely motivation is along the lines of Dieselgate. And yes, it can be proven that managers make bad decisions that incur legal liability.