There is a long article on the US Army's $200 billion Future Combat System (FCS) in today's Washington Post and its dependence on software. The article points out a few of the "challenges" confronting the program like making a 63.8 million line of code system work, let alone be hacker proof.
One bit of the story caught my eye, however. The supposedly original 2003 estimate by the Army was for FCS to require 33.7 million lines of code; it has now blossomed to a current estimate of 63.8 million lines of code. However, Boeing, the program's lead contractor, claims that the original estimate was for actually 55 million lines of code, implying code growth isn't that bad.
The reason I find this curious is that the 33.7 million lines of code estimate has been around for several years, and appears in Congressional testimony many, many times. That number gave lots of folks pause in 2003, since the Army claimed at the time that it would complete FCS in five and a half-years. Questions were raised then about whether that amount of code could be developed in that time frame, but the ever-confident Army said it could be accomplished.
I have never heard or seen that 55 million lines of code number ever mentioned before this article. If that was the true estimate at proposal time, did the contractor and the Army "forget" to let Congress, the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO), and a whole bunch of other people know the true system size so that they wouldn't ask questions in 2003 like, "Tell me again how you plan to develop and integrate an average of 10 million lines of native and commercial-off-the-shelf software per year over each of the next five years?" "Can you point to any military software-intensive development of 10 million lines of code successfully completed in 5 years?" "Can you prove you are not legally insane?"
As Ricky used to say to Lucy, "Lucy, you got some explaining to do." If not Boeing, then certainly the Army needs to explain where this 55 million lines of code number came from, if it was the originally proposed number, and why it hasn't ever been disclosed before.
