- For the first time ever, the senior architect and lead developer for a key enterprise system on NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover mission shares the secrets to one of the most difficult technology tasks of all-successful software development
- Written in a conversational, brief, and to-the-point style, this book presents principles learned from the Mars Rover project that will help ensure the success of software developed for any enterprise system
- Author Ronald Mak imparts anecdotes from his work on the Mars Rover and offers valuable lessons on software architecture, software engineering, design patterns, code development, and project management for any software, regardless of language or platform
When you need to land and operate a robot on Mars, "halfway" software is not an option. While helping to develop the Collaborative Information Portal, or CIP, for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, Ronald Mak identified and refined a set of principles that represent the fundamental goals necessary for any successful enterprise system. Following them, Mak's team developed a CIP that scientists, researchers, and engineers have been using continually for over two years to access data from two Martian rovers. Its uptime record—99.9%.
The principles are language and platform independent. They're not design patterns or code samples. They're not even rocket science. They just work.
Real-world examples from the Rover mission help you learn to:
- Take advantage of what others have learned from their mistakes
- Realize that clients may not know how to know what they want
- Acknowledge that you aren't clairvoyant
- Think like a user
- Test, anticipate, be flexible, and keep it simple
- Recognize that code integration is a greater challenge than code development
- Become the successful architect of a successful system
