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The most complicated projects that humanity has built are software. The tooling and the culture in the software world is decades ahead of fields like engineeri
by Gravityloss 4y ago
The most complicated projects that humanity has built are software.
The tooling and the culture in the software world is decades ahead of fields like engineering or business management.
Take ideas like version control - a way to do change management. Open source. Test driven development. Continuous integration. These have existed in a nascent way in other fields, but software engineering has really taken the ideas to the next level.
I know some new hardware companies that have taken these approaches to their whole integrated hardware-software development methodology, with extreme success.
So it seems we need new car companies in Europe, and at least one founder probably needs to have used git.
- gumby 4y ago> Take ideas like version control - a way to do change management. Test driven development. Continuous integration. These have existed in a nascent way in other fields, but software engineering has really taken the ideas to the next level. TBF version control started (SCCS, RCS etc) by modeling how version control was done in mechanical engineering and architecture. Just look at the manual version control in old blueprints. Nowadays CAD systems like solidworks have a VCS for your models too. Absolute shit based on proprietary MS file formats, but it is there and it works. OTOH there are reasons why you can't do TDD in the physical engineering, much less CI. When you're building a bridge you have to do FEA on your design, but the cost committment of construction doesn't allow much incremental change as you go -- almost all is in response to problems found once you've started building. Code review is inherited from practices of other engineering disciplines.
- Gravityloss 4y agoAnd that's what I wrote, they were indeed taken from other disciplines. Thanks for expanding it.