3 ms·
> problems that were individually not predictable But they were surely predictable in aggregate, no? There's only so much volume in the house and a volume will
by firstlink 4y ago
> problems that were individually not predictable
But they were surely predictable in aggregate, no? There's only so much volume in the house and a volume will take a bounded amount of time to deal with, even if the bound is very large. An oceanic vessel has a maximum amount of mass that can be added or removed, and every unit mass will take a bounded amount of time.
This isn't the case for development. There is a bound to how much code can possibly go in a project, but there is no bound for how much development work goes into any unit of code.
- ghaff 4y ago>But they were surely predictable in aggregate, no? Only in the sense of jobs seem to take at least twice as long as they "ought" to. The volume of the vessel has very little to do with it. In a refit, you know some things going in--which may indeed be relatively straightforward (so long as the right parts arrive on time)--but for bigger jobs lots of things crop up including resource conflicts and parts that need to be ordered. If software projects added more slack, they'd be more likely to be completed on time too. There's nothing magical about software. And, in fact, software doesn't need to deal with a lot of the quirks of physical systems.