Thread by @MrAlanCooper

Software development is so NOT carpentry. Carpenters around the world get very consistent results from known materials, tools, and processes. 1

https://twitter.com/_theek_/status/1112157768146919425

It’s true, however, that carpenters generally are given definitive documents before they even begin. Blueprints. Detailed blueprints that describe in great detail exactly what the carpenter must build. 2

Maybe if developers were given detailed blueprints they could bring some predictability and repeatability to the software development process. 3

Unfortunately, there’s a nasty conundrum here.

The only sufficiently detailed blueprint for software development is…

wait for it…

code. 4

So, in order to make software development the reliable, understandable, predictable, repeatable process that we expect from other crafts such as carpentry, we’d have to code everything twice. 5

Code everything twice.

Once to learn what we are making and how to make it, and then a second time to make it good enough to actually be what we expect it to be. 6

Hmmm. A fairly quick, easy, and straightforward solution to the biggest problem in the biggest arena: software development.

It will never happen. Just ask yourself why. 7

I mean, writing code isn’t really all that hard. The difficulty arises from the mismatch between the level of detail in the specification documents and the level of minutia involved in coding. 8

And not the minutia in coding itself, but the minutia of the code’s behavior. That is, every diagram or sentence in any descriptive software design document might answer 5 or 10 possibilities, while the code needed to support it might address 50 or 100 possibilities. 9

The fact that we don’t know how to build software might—just might—have something to do with the fact that our software is eating our world. 10