What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 1998

LOL, no problem, AFAIK it is out of service. If it isn't they are welcome to invite me to do some Consulting for them. ;)

It was an important choice because we were so short of man-power and time. We did not have time to learn new tools or work the wrinkles out of them, the choice of tools had no impact functionality whatsoever.

There were at least 4 other teams at other outfits that I had some contact with who did this exact same job. Most of them had in excess of 30 man-months to do that project, we had a maximum of 9, we achieved it in just over 6 (one week ahead of the delivery date).

We had a pretty simple system for unit testing. There were two us working on it in the main, one of us would write the spec, the other do the coding, then the spec writer would write and perform the unit- test. I doubt that method would scale well, but it worked very well in the small team we had, and it shook out the interface problems and misunderstandings pretty much straight away.

Oh... The other point is that we were very rigid about keeping spec and design+implementation seperate. Helped to keep us focussed on the target rather than getting caught up in fancy coding tricks. :)

Cheers, Rupert