Software engineers are lazy bastards

As I've understood it engineers in other disciplines often have goto specs for various things: x inches of steel will hold such and such a weight material y can handle a current of z at gauge g, etc

Why hasnt this been standardized in SENG? Maybe we should have simple components that are used in all cases and engineers become more like people playing with legos, fitting pieces together instead of inventing new blocks over and over.

A bridge is a bad example. Bridge analog in software engineering is a bodyshop that creates typical e-shops for example. And the first (comparable to modern software projects) “hard” engineering project was Apollo Program. It was so complex so new engineering approach was introduced to get it done. But such “hard” engineering projects are relatively rare, software ones are not.

I think engineering discipline is about knowing how much testing is required to ensure your code is good enough with a high probability.

If you make a change to your code, how much testing is required to know it works? If you don't write a unit test, will it lead to technical debt? Are you capable of testing your own code?

The article doesn't really get into many methods of verifying and testing software. If making unit tests was unusual up to very recently, who is to say that the current focus on unit tests isn't just a local optimum?

- Generative testing; essentially randomized unit tests. Seems better when the alternative is to write a bunch of mostly similar unit tests with some parameters changed in an ad-hoc way.

- The style of languages like Ada with asserts and pre/post conditions. Aided with powerful pragmas so that you can turn off checks for production builds (if that is wanted).

- Expressive static type systems.

- <You can probably inform me of even more approaches>

I would make a comment but ... I'm too lazy for this post.