[bartread]

And except that the factory analogy of software delivery has always been utterly terrible.

If you want to draw parallels between software delivery and automotive delivery then most of what software engineers do would fall into the design and development phases. The bit that doesn’t: the manufacturing phase - I.e., creating lots of copies of the car - is most closely modelled by deployment, or distribution of deliverables (e.g., downloading a piece of software - like an app on your phone - creates a copy of it).

The “manufacturing phase” of software is super thin, even for most basic crud apps, because every application is different, and creating copies is practically free.

The idea that because software goes through a standardised workflow and pipeline over and over and over again as it’s built it’s somehow like a factory is also bullshit. You don’t think engineers and designers follow a standardised process when they develop a new car?

It would be crazy for auto factory workers to check every angle. It is absolutely not crazy for designers and engineers to have a deep understanding of the new car they’re developing.

The difference between auto engineering and software engineering is that in one your final prototype forms the basis for building out manufacturing to create copies of it, whereas in the other your final prototype is the only copy you need and becomes the thing you ship.

(Shipping cadence is irrelevant: it still doesn’t make software delivery a factory.)

This entire line of reasoning is… not really reasoning. It’s utterly vacuous.

[fsloth]

It’s not only vacuous. It’s incompentent by failing to recognize the main value add mechanisms. In software delivery, manufacturing, or both. I’m not sure if Dunning-Krueger model is scientifically valid or not but this would be a very Dunning-Krueger thing to say (high confidence, total incompentence).

[fisf]

> The “manufacturing phase” of software is super thin, even for most basic crud apps, because every application is different, and creating copies is practically free.

This is not true from a manager's perspective (indoctrinated by Taylorism). From a manager's perspective, development is manufacturing, and underlying business process is the blueprint.

[bartread]

I don't know about that: I'm a manager, I'm aware of Taylorism (and isn't that guy discredited by sensible people anyway?), and I don't think the factory view holds up. Manufacturing is about making the same thing (or very similar things) over and over and over again at scale. That almost couldn't be further from software development: every project is different, every requirement is different, the effort in every new release goes into a different area of the software. Just because, after it's gone through the CD pipeline the output is 98% the same is irrelevant, because all the software development effort for that release went into the 2%.

[kloop]

> The idea that because software goes through a standardised workflow and pipeline over and over and over again as it’s built it’s somehow like a factory is also bullshit.

I don't think it's bs. The pipeline system is almost exactly like a factory. In fact, the entire system we've created is probably what you get when cost of creating a factory approaches instantaneous and free.

The compilation step really does correspond to the "build" phase in the project lifecycle. We've just completely automated by this point.

What's hard for people to understand is that the bit right before the build phase that takes all the man-hours isn't part of the build phase. This is an understandable mistake, as the build phase in physical projects takes most of the man-hours, but it doesn't make it any more correct.

[bartread]

You're misunderstanding my meaning with pipeline: you're thinking it's just the CD part of the equation. I'm thinking about it as the whole software development and delivery process (planning, design, UX, dev, test, PR reviews, CD, etc), which can be standardised (and indeed some certifications require it to be standardised). In that context, even when the development pipeline follows a standardised process, most of it's nothing like a factory: just the CD part, as you've correctly identified. Because the output of CD will be, for mature software, 99+% similar to the output of the previous build - it is definitely somewhat analagous to manufacturing, although if you think about adding tests, etc., the process evolves a lot more often and rapidly than many production lines.

[shakna]

> You don’t think engineers and designers follow a standardised process when they develop a new car?

Apparently the Cybertruck did not. And that sort of speaks for itself.