737 Replacement

wrote:
Hardware testing is much more straightforward, because it is much more
difficult to design and build complex hardware, and because hardware
does not have many catastrophic failure modes. Additionally, hardware
is expensive and cannot easily be modified, so there is a much greater
incentive to get it right.



Oh really? How many circuit boards have you designed? I have designed
quite a few, and have done the embedded firmware for them as well.
Hardware designs can have bugs just as can software, they are just of a
different nature. Hardware bugs can be much harder to find and fix
than software becasue they are often the results of multiple variables
(circuit/environment/input conditions/power quality etc.). By
comparison, software is at least constrained to a specific set of
instructions and syntax. Plenty of hardware designs have bugs that
slip past initial testing and don't get found until the right corner
condition is hit...

I agree. I started life as a computer scientist (CS degree) and then
went back to school a few years later for my EE degree. Both areas have
their challenges. The advantage in circuit design is that the tools are
much more advanced as is the underlying theory. The software
community has a long way to go in this arena. The disadvantage in
circuit design is that circuits don't always behave the same way.
Changes in temperature can introduce problems for example as can static
electricity. A circuit can work fine one day and not the next.
Software works the same every day. All software problems are design
errors, whereas hardware has both design and fabrication errors as well
as material degradation over time. None of these affect software.

I'm not going to say either area is easier or harder than the other as
both have their challenges.


Matt