I have just recently read an interesting post in Cedric blog:

“..software engineering is nowhere near as advanced as building engineering is. We are still working on these nuts and bolts, and whenever a new software project starts, we still can’t be sure it won’t collapse under its own weight after just a year. To make a parallel: imagine a world where every time a new construction takes place (say, a bridge), the future of that bridge depends on the team of engineers and workers you choose to build it…”

Bridges do collapse. Tragedy shows that even standard engineering solution which was following strict guidelines, regularly inspected and maintained could fail.

One bridge is a relatively simple construction. We can probably compare it to one week of programmer’s work considering complexity, number of elements and relations between parts. What could we compare in the engineering to the several month project with many developers and subsystems involved? It is comparable to the very complex construction like combination of hundreds interlinked bridges (don’t ask me to prove my ballpark estimates :)). It is comparable to the construction of Boeing. How much does research and development of Boeing 787 cost? $11 bln dollars.

Typical software projects have much lower cost, much less people and don’t have luxury of relying on stable laws of the physical world and established engineering principles. But programmers carry in their brains the same amount of information, many system relations and complexity as in advanced engineering projects . These are essential difficulties that software developers are facing. In addition they deal with the changeable world of people and business needs.

Major bridges collapse every 30 years and engineers learn from these mistakes and make better and more reliable designs. When we complain that Software Development doesn’t have the same sound practices as engineering, we shouldn’t accuse just immaturity of our profession. It is one of the most intellectually complex human activities dealing with very complex systems. I just hope we will experience less and less collapsing bridges both in physical and software worlds.

Posted by Andriy Solovey | Permalink | Trackback