> It's pretty much the same nowadays: > engineers keep building new generations > of airplanes which are heavily tested > snapshots of current "trun

> It's pretty much the same nowadays: > engineers keep building new generations > of airplanes which are heavily tested > snapshots of current "trunk" branch. It really depends on which industry you're talking about. I remember somewhere reading about "emergent" and "convergent" industries. Many mature industries like commercial aircraft manufacturing are "convergent" meaning that their goal is providing the customer what they're expecting. Success is measured by "meeting the spec", beating the competition using some combination of price, reliability, time-to-market, and leveraging established status and reputation in the market. I think your SW development analogy of version control branches applies to convergent industries. There are other industries which are "emergent." These types of industries attempt to create markets with entirely new and unexpected products. They don't face competition, instead their success hinges on developing the market for the product. The rules are entirely different for each of these two categories.