Engineering, no matter where it is, is about reacting to costs and benefits. Software engineering has radically different costs and benefits than physical engin

Engineering, no matter where it is, is about reacting to costs and benefits. Software engineering has radically different costs and benefits than physical engineering. It would be inappropriate to blindly copy over the engineering practices from other fields without adapting to the huge changes on both the costs and benefits sides. If other engineering fields had metaphorically similar costs and benefits to software, their procedures would look like ours. If they could flip a flag to change the color scheme on their hotel and push the "compile" button to tear down the entire previous hotel and build a new one in 30 seconds, they would not be using blueprints and carefully planning their every move. They'd incrementally build a structure just like we do, pre-existing libraries, iterative development, the whole thing. They don't not because this is not engineering, but because they can't. You can't afford to have an inspector come in at the end of their project and announce that the ceilings are 6 inches under code and the whole thing is condemned. I find the occasional moon-struck love affair with other engineering disciplines and how they're doing real engineering and aren't they just so dreamy to be badly misplaced. They would be jealous of us, if they knew what we had. They're doing real engineering. We're doing real engineering. The people not doing real engineering are the ones who blindly copy inappropriate methodologies from other engineering disciplines, which is the engineering methodology equivalent of writing object oriented code in Haskell. Building a program like it's a skyscraper and we must plan our every line of code, which we can place only once, and it must be perfectly correct, six months in advance, is as inappropriate as trying to build a skyscraper through iterative development.