Yes! I still meet too many people who think what we are manufacturing software, while what we are doing is designing it. The manufacturing, that is, the building and deployment is already highly automated and very cheap.
A significant percentage of the time you’re researching software — determining if something is even possible.
This is the even more crucial difference and the reason for all the time estimation arguments.
If a manager can’t estimate a car production run schedule they’re a bad manager.
No manager can schedule — to the day — when fusion powered cars will be ready for shipping.
Yet, this is expected from people trying something entirely new in software.
“Integrate these two things that no human has put together before. Now that you’ve heard this single sentence, tell me: will it be ready Tuesday or Wednesday… a year from now?”
This is why Agile/Standups make people go crazy! The daily standup makes sense when all the topics discussed will close out within hours, blockers sometimes stand literally upstream on the assembly line, and no one can really talk to each other outside of the standup because they’re too busy running manufacturing work centers that need 100% of their constant attention.
Imagine if compiling/deploying involved teams on the daily hand writing assembly/machine code from code base?
This is the even more crucial difference and the reason for all the time estimation arguments.
If a manager can’t estimate a car production run schedule they’re a bad manager.
No manager can schedule — to the day — when fusion powered cars will be ready for shipping.
Yet, this is expected from people trying something entirely new in software.
“Integrate these two things that no human has put together before. Now that you’ve heard this single sentence, tell me: will it be ready Tuesday or Wednesday… a year from now?”