Follow the money. If people were willing to commit to a specification with the same level of precision as a civil engineering blueprint and then stick to that specification then you’d see a dramatic uptick in software quality, along with a dramatic uptick in price and time to develop. But since hardly anybody wants to commit to that kind of precise design or pay the cost we get what we have today instead.

Come to SE Asia and I’ll show you plenty of civil engineering projects with similarly poor planning and execution.