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by pflenker 1188 days ago
The comparison to home building is not a good one - houses are things which are repeated, with customizations and slight modifications, and people are deeply familiar with houses. The closest analogy in the software world would be simple websites such as blog or easy shops, where e.g. a WordPress plus some customizations would be enough.

Software is completely different though. Building chatgpt is vastly different from building Google Maps, for instance. And on top of that, most interesting software projects are not mere copies of other projects, so the whole idea of the customer knowing what they want does not apply.
2 comments
r_hoods_ghost 1188 days ago
I hear this a lot. The counter argument is virtually no one is going from implementing chat gpt as project 1 to implementing google maps as project 2. In fact they are going from implementing v1 of google Maps to v1.1.

When I worked as a kitchen fitter there was a much greater difference between projects that anything I've experienced with a single employer as a dev. Fitting a top end kitchen in a listed 500 year old cottage is vastly different to fitting a budget kitchen in a new build, to fitting a period appropriate kitchen in a 1930s town house. Building out the next version of an API or writing a rendered, not so much.

I think a lot of Devs have a vastly inflated sense of the "uniqueness" of what they are implementing, and I think a lot of that derives from the industries obsession with reinventing the wheel, NIH syndrome and fashion driven development.

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Gravityloss 1188 days ago
Having fitted two kitchens, buildings are crooked... You need shimming and planning far ahead, and lots of measuring if you want to get something that is mostly straight.
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eurasiantiger 1188 days ago
That completely depends on the size of the employer. Small shops give devs more variety, as they simply have less resources to go around.
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ljf 1188 days ago
Exactly - as I say: If you know exactly what you want and are happy to wait, then an agile methodology probably isn't for you.

I think you missed my point, (sorry if it wasn't clear). An agile way of working can be right if you want to test and learn and you need to unlock value quickly (or more quickly than building a whole).

But the industry I work in, even 'agile' projects come with 6 month planning 'sprint zero', and then basically just use sprints to work through a waterfall plan. Getting no value from 'agile'.

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