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Why you can't run a software project like a house-building project
- brudgers 9y agoBuilding a building is similar to building software. It is just that the time scale is different. There are lots of thirty year old houses. Most have had a succession of features and functional refactorings etc. Walls get painted, systems get energy efficiency upgrades, carpet gets replaced with wood. In terms of planning, the big difference is that the construction industry starts from the premises: 1. projects can be planned 2. plans change. The software industry tends to make its life easier by claiming that 2 negates 1. It's more a lack of industry experience (construction traditions go back millenia versus decades). If a person looks at construction done by lay people, it looks a lot like typical software development. There's a vague idea and then building commences and there's a legacy of early decisions that didn't work as out well as they might have and layers of cruft and latent bugs.