Der Steppenwolf

Un par de apuntes interesantes sobre las “fábricas de Software” y el desarrollo de software:

What makes software so hard?

“Software projects in general have an unimpressive track record when compared to traditional engineering projects. ¹ There are a vast number of reports documenting software projects that were seriously over budget, over schedule, or even cancelled. Even those projects that eventually manage to get a product out of the door will in most cases have to spend considerable time doing post release fixes and corrections..”

The “factory approach” to software development is bound to fail

Many large software development organizations fail to see or acknowledge the difference between design and production projects, and attempt to use business and management approaches that might be well suited for production and manufacturing projects, but which will not work well for software projects, which are non-mechanical, far from trivial, and fully dependent on the quality of the people involved.

Compared to production projects, design projects demand a fundamentally different approach. Costs can ultimately not be kept down by hiring low-pay “human automations,” capable only of well defined mechanical tasks. Time-to-market cannot be improved by adding more of these “automations” to the project, or by asking them to work “faster.” Most of the tasks involved are simply too complex for lending themselves to mechanization. For design projects to be successful, all staff involved must be very knowledgeable, skilled, and experienced in a broad range of software engineering topics, ranging from understanding the problem domain and customer needs, all the way down to the specifics of the implementation platform. Furthermore, they also need to be motivated.

Summary and conclusion

Software is hard for a number of fundamental reasons:

• Software projects are design projects, not production projects.
• Because software is pure mindware, software development is more of an art or craft than a science or engineering discipline, making the “doing” disciplines of software development difficult to perform, monitor, and measure. Productivity differences between individuals are huge.
• Software lacks laws and first principles.
• Software lacks a measurable standard unit of work.
• Given software’s flexibility, the “supporting” disciplines of software projects — planning, estimation, prediction and observation — are quite difficult.
• Moore’s law makes the foundations of software ever changing — there’s no “permanent” platform to build on.

Even though it might be tempting to consider software engineering as “just another engineering discipline,” and thus jump to the conclusion that software can be developed using the same business, management, and engineering principles as traditional engineering, there are some unique characteristics that make software and software development not only special, but also more difficult to estimate and monitor than traditional engineering projects.

 Software Development Still Sucks

Basically, as much as it’s called “computer science,” it really isn’t much of a science. It’s hardly even a process. I recently had a chat with someone who had switched jobs from one big company with a reputation for extremely complex and buggy software to one that had a reputation for very clean software. He talked about how he thought he’d learn so much at the new company, only to realize that the development process there was just as messy (in some cases, even messier). Rosenberg makes a few interesting points, about how hardware improvements have followed Moore’s Law, while it seems like software has almost been dragged along by accident — though, perhaps a more accurate way of looking at things is that the hardware improvements of Moore’s Law have actually allowed us to hide the problems of software development by simply throwing more horsepower at things.

5 Software Development Mistakes to Avoid