Comment by gbvb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbvb | Hacker News Reader

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Software development is like movie making: http://www.silicon-stories.com/movie-making-software-develop...

Software architecture is like city planning: http://www.windley.com/archives/2003/09/enterprise_arch_4.sh...

Software development is not like manufacturing: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/10/is-software-develop...

Software development is like manufacturing: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321150783/codihorr-2...

I believe that software development can be disciplined (development of missile control systems, payroll systems) or be agile (instagram, pinterest, facebook...). I think it all depends on what is considered to be the most valued resource for the organization and the software it is planning to build/compose/manufacture/make.

If we value system resources (real time constraints, compliance, SLA), we tend to be more like building systems. If we value end users experience in the final outcome, it tends be agile and take the notion of the movie/novel et al.

I agree there's a range, but if you have to abandon an analogy to describe another end of the range, then it's time to find a new analogy. I think one trap in the article's logic is thinking that all structural engineering is at the scale of bay-spanning bridges or skyscrapers. Structural engineering can range from structures that withstand earthquakes down to a shack to stash your garden tools--just because one end of the continuum requires more rigor than the other doesn't make them unrelated.

In software engineering there are still rigorous requirements in fields that run software on other planets or in medical systems, but there's software with looser requirements as well.

The best metaphor I've encountered for the wide variety of software engineering was a talk that covered the book "How Buildings Learn" http://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn/dp/0140139966 -- there are structures that favor adaptability, and others that favor rigor, but that doesn't mean that structural engineering doesn't happen on one end of the continuum compared to the other.

(To be fair, there are rigorous forms of writing, too, but I think restricting the analogy to only novels is too narrow to be effective.)

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