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I'm not convinced "software development is R&D, not a construction" is really true. But, I agree there are more unknowns. Maybe more accurately... - construct

• 9rx 2y ago
  > I'm not convinced "software development is R&D, not a construction" is really true. Software development being development (the D in R&D) must be true, surely? It literally asserts it. It may be that some non-development work in software is inappropriately labeled software development, granted.
  • alistairSH 2y ago
    Yep, that's exactly it. Traditional (meat-space) engineering has a clearer delineation between design and build (and whatever other phase you want to include). We can see this in estimating bigger infrastructure projects (where there's an end-to-end estimate of time and budget) - at least in the US, these almost always miss as well. But, building a housing development (once permitting/zoning is done) has a much higher likelihood of being close to estimates. Building a spec house is a "solved" problem. Similarly, if a software team is building a pile of CRUD APIs with a basic web frontend, in a domain they have experience, they should be able to estimate that pretty well.
    • 9rx 2y ago
      > Traditional (meat-space) engineering has a clearer delineation between design and build I'm not so sure about that. But, in software, the builders - historically known as coders - got automated out of a job by compilers. Software is entirely design-side nowadays. Builds are done by machine.