[kjellsbells]

> management needs to get on board with the idea of probabilistic forecasting that's continually revisited

From the manager's pov, though, that just sounds like guesswork. "When will my house be built?" "Eh, not sure, but theres a 60% chance the framing will be up by July".

Development managers need to learn to communicate on the same wavelength as their customers, and vice versa. It rarely happens.

[hinkley]

The thing is construction people do talk like that.

I think that’s why rich people often make terrible customers. They are just as grouchy at plumbers and general contractors as they are at us.

Which reminds me, one of my life goals is to get a full rundown of GC tricks to apply to software development. I’m running out of time for that to make a quality of life difference.

[psunavy03]

You're conflating the complicated with the complex. Construction workers don't need Agile methods, which is why "there's a 60% chance the framing will be up by July" sounds so dumb. The physical properties of wood framing, electrical wire, shingles, and drywall haven't changed in decades. You can make detailed plans around these known facts, and workers generally know predictably what it takes to build a house.

Software is not like that. Codebases are too big, especially counting third-party dependencies. Tech debt is lurking everywhere. Customers don't know what they want until they see it. So yes, in enterprise-sized software, you need probabilistic forecasting precisely because you're NOT building a building. It's impossible to know things in enough detail up front to make big up-front plans that don't largely change like you could if you were building a house.

[pwatsonwailes]

I say this with love but, you've never worked in construction have you.

Architects drawings are little more than nicely descriptive hopes and sketches of an intended idea, which a good contractor has to turn into an actual plan of work.

You want to see chaos go talk to the person running the development of a high end property in New York.

[hinkley]

I have a way of getting people to talk to me about their professions. At the tail end of a water damage repair, the GC confessed to me that they flood customers with trivial choices to distract them from the illusion of choice in other areas. Like the physics of plumbing dictating where sinks can go.

As I mentioned up thread, I want to buy a GC beers and get them to tell me more, before I ever take another contracting gig.

[TeMPOraL]

You need probabilistic forecasting for everything. I used it with great success to forecast the costs of the general renovation of an apartment we were moving into. Seeing the shapes and ranges of distributions was very informative (and in particular informed the decision on whether and when to take an extra loan). Can't imagine doing it any other way now, even though I had to hack my way into doing it, because approximately none of the tools I know of support this out of the box.

(I ended up using Guesstimate for it - https://www.getguesstimate.com/ - pushing it to the limit of nearly hanging my browser.)

Problem is, most people seem to be overwhelmed by those ideas. It's not hard, but then again multiplication isn't hard either, and most people are afraid of that too. This is a problem because software tends to target the lowest common denominator, which is how we get a million Trello clones, but no tools that understand that work breaks into DAGs, not 2-level-deep trees, or that Gantt charts are good to have, or that probabilistic Gantt charts would be even better.

[InitialLastName]

> You're conflating the complicated with the complex. Construction workers don't need Agile methods, which is why "there's a 60% chance the framing will be up by July" sounds so dumb. The physical properties of wood framing, electrical wire, shingles, and drywall haven't changed in decades.

When's the last time you saw a construction project that landed on time? Construction projects are a classic example of forecasting difficulty. Lots of things have to go smoothly at the right time, including supply chain, coordinating work from multiple organizations (including local governments), and the weather has to play nice.