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Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetec

Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site. But I've probably got it kind of backwards. Manufacturing is where unit tests probably come from and we have been slowly adopting them into programming as we realized their value.

hobofan 8y ago
> Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site. You have an optimistic view of the digitalization of construction project management. I attended a talk not too long ago from one of the bigger project management solution players in the field and they reported that the status quo for most construction projects is progress tracking via Excel. Structured data in a form that could be used together with autonomous drones is still a few long steps away.
- nataz 8y ago
  In my experience [1], construction project management econpasses a lot more then just testing, and both levels have to deal with structured and unstructured digital information. There is a lot of Excel and Microsoft project at the higher levels (resource loading, financial tracking), with more specific software tooling for the lower down/more specialized work (think material and labor estimates, load calculations, environmental modeling, other engineering calculations). It's true, a firm building residential track housing may be working off really simple project management tools, but that may be all you need. Start building things like powerplants, bridges, skyscrapers and you'll see a whole new tool set. [1] responsible for $100m+ civil entering and construction projects annually
acomjean 8y ago
Construction has lots of tests. At least the landfill construction I was involved with. Each truckload of concrete gets cylinders made. soil/gravel gets sent to labs for testing. Landfill liner welds get field tested and sent to labs to be strength tested for every X ft of welding... I'm not sure how you would use a drone to help this.

hobofan 8y ago

> Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site. You have an optimistic view of the digitalization of construction project management. I attended a talk not too long ago from one of the bigger project management solution players in the field and they reported that the status quo for most construction projects is progress tracking via Excel. Structured data in a form that could be used together with autonomous drones is still a few long steps away.

nataz 8y ago
In my experience [1], construction project management econpasses a lot more then just testing, and both levels have to deal with structured and unstructured digital information. There is a lot of Excel and Microsoft project at the higher levels (resource loading, financial tracking), with more specific software tooling for the lower down/more specialized work (think material and labor estimates, load calculations, environmental modeling, other engineering calculations). It's true, a firm building residential track housing may be working off really simple project management tools, but that may be all you need. Start building things like powerplants, bridges, skyscrapers and you'll see a whole new tool set. [1] responsible for $100m+ civil entering and construction projects annually

acomjean 8y ago

Construction has lots of tests. At least the landfill construction I was involved with. Each truckload of concrete gets cylinders made. soil/gravel gets sent to labs for testing. Landfill liner welds get field tested and sent to labs to be strength tested for every X ft of welding... I'm not sure how you would use a drone to help this.