Software development is not engineering, but it's also not completely arbitrary. It's a craft, and like all other craftspeople, you build intuition through expe

Software development is not engineering, but it's also not completely arbitrary. It's a craft, and like all other craftspeople, you build intuition through experience, which guides decision-making. It's a little controversial to say that it isn't engineering, but compare what we do to things like building bridges or constructing dams. The level of rigor in those fields is galaxies apart from almost all of software development. You _could_ apply it, and some organizations do, especially when lives are on the line, but the cost/benefit ratio is impossible to justify in almost all software development. This isn't to say that "real" engineers don't also build intuition, but they have enormously higher accountability requirements. In some areas I would argue that software development _should_ have much higher accountability, but this also means a significantly higher cost. I think governments around the world are coming to realize that the money would be well spent.