[ryandrake]

Software company managers want assembly-line-like predictability out of a process that is more like artwork: Good programming output requires discipline and process, but it also relies on creativity, inspiration, luck, the ability to explore and dabble, following roads down dead ends, and so on.

If you ask most high-ups in your software company whether they would rather a 100% guaranteed release date of Sept. 1, 2023 or a 75% confidence sometime between July and October, if they are honest with themselves, they will admit they would rather have the 100% date. So much other stuff needs to happen on fixed dates. Marketing campaigns need to ramp up, sales teams need to get started, maybe your project is part of a bigger product which has a known release date, maybe your project gets flashed onto hardware that goes on a boat on some fixed date.

It would be so much easier for software companies if making software was like making a bolt or a screw: Raw material go in -> machines do their machining -> product come out a known time later, at a known rate, with a known yield.

[gymbeaux]

That lends itself to the notion that they think writing software is akin to an assembly line, which is quite predictable by comparison. But we aren't writing the same thing over and over and over again. It's like they see the stakeholders describe what they want to the BA and the BA gives the requirements to the SWE and then the QA tests it... and they just envision an assembly line.