Tech Forum

Watching Elder Whiting's talk in General Conference this weekend made me wonder about software the Church uses in the temple. Is it held to a similar "temple standard." If so, what techniques do Church software development staff use to attain this level of quality?

mndrix wrote:Watching Elder Whiting's talk in General Conference this weekend made me wonder about software the Church uses in the temple. Is it held to a similar "temple standard." If so, what techniques do Church software development staff use to attain this level of quality?

Judging from an experience I had not too long ago, my personal guess would be no. They use the same computers and software that we do. My recommend was checked the old fashioned way when neither the primary system nor the backup was working when I arrived at the temple one day. And the temple recorder, a friend, was scrambling and had no time to visit.

What a wonderful thought, though. Wouldn't it be nice. One can dream.

I wonder if the failure of both the primary and backup systems was what caused the Tier 3 teams to be swamped with calls last Thursday. I did hear that the FamilySearch Tier 3 team had to cancel a regularly-scheduled 'FamilySearch Wiki Technical Meeting' last Thursday due to the load of calls they were getting. No one had the answer as to why as we only got the word second-hand on another call I was on just prior to when that was scheduled to happen.

It seems like software for the temple might be a good place to use static analysis and/or formal verification tools. They're perhaps too expensive for most projects, but might be appropriate when offering our best to the Lord.

JamesAnderson wrote:I wonder if the failure of both the primary and backup systems was what caused the Tier 3 teams to be swamped with calls last Thursday.

Well, I did say "not too long ago", but it was way before last Thursday. And the cause was at the local end and not at the server end. It just happened that both paths to the outside world were down at the same time.