[Jtsummers]

Kind of. We have to clarify what we mean by "creating a software".

This seems to be rarely done in most discussions on processes for software development. The lack of information regarding this means that everyone gets to be right and angry at everyone else.

Are you making novel systems? Then it's like developing a recipe for a cake. Are you making bog standard CRUD web apps? Then you're baking thousands of cakes.

A lot of software development sits somewhere in between these two extremes. It has repeatable, well-established portions that can be executed almost mechanically, and portions that require you to sit down and collaborate or really think about what you're doing. How these balance out on a project determines what approaches are appropriate to even consider.

Then there's software maintenance (an unfortunately neglected aspect of software in many parts of this industry). Here the same consideration applies. Are you writing new software that's really just generating new kinds of custom reports? That's rather mechanical, you may even be able to automate yourself out of a job. Or are you adding truly novel features, extending your document editor to support real-time networked collaboration?

Software runs the full gamut so no statement about what software is will ever be correct. We can only discuss the utility or applicability of processes once we specify which kinds of software activities we're involved in.

[Zigurd]

Certainly some software looks routine and feels repetitious while you are doing it. But very little if any software is amenable to determining its manufacturing tolerances. That phrase is jarring because the idea of manufacturing tolerances for software does not make sense. But manufacturing tolerances are fundamental to statistical process control, which then builds on statistically valid sampling to determine if part of a process is failing. (Or it can determine that a quality issue is something other than a process failure.) But it depends on setting and using manufacturing tolerances wisely.