[yarbas89]

I sort of understand what you're saying but I'm struggling to agree with your examples in the comparison.

Even if you're working on a "project" comprising hundreds of near identical houses, there could be massive differences in the project constraints and their solutions for adjacent plots for any given selection of houses.

There could for example be a large tree with root protection zones on site where you would have to carefully design the foundations to account for this and their future effects such as heave due to volume change potential of the underlying soil.

My point is that there are many "hidden" problems solved by the design team during the project / design phase even for seemingly insignificant or simpler "projects". In my experience of analysing and designing hundreds of buildings for over a decade every project was unique and as such treated like a "project".

[weinzierl]

I think there is a spectrum and I think most construction projects are more similar to mass production than real projects. I'm not a civil engineer and maybe I am wrong and it is not the best example.

The point I am trying to make is that there are more unknowns in most IT projects than in many other endeavors because it is still a young field. If construction is the best counterexample, I'm not sure.