Joel on Software

2001/12/30

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Doc says, "When the software industry is mature, it will look a lot like the construction industry." This is a common theme. A lot of people complain about how the creation of software suffers from all kinds of problems that mature professions (construction, civil engineering, etc) don't. The key problem is always that the software coding process doesn't seem to be reproducible and predictable. Programmers think things will take 10 weeks and then they take 20 weeks, and they have weird bugs that you would never tolerate from a bridge built by a civic engineer.

Implicit in the claim that the software industry is "immature" is the belief that this is just because we haven't learned all the tricks yet to getting reproducible results. But this idea rests on a falsehood. The unique thing about software is that it is infinitely clonable. Once you've written a subroutine, you can call it as often as you want. This means that almost everything we do as software developers is something that has never been done before. This is very different than what construction workers do. Herman the Handyman, who just installed a tile floor for me, has probably installed hundreds of tile floors. He has to keep installing tile floors again and again as long as new tile floors are needed. We in the software industry would have long since written a Tile Floor Template Library (TFTL) and generating new tile floors would be trivial. (OK, maybe there would be six versions of the library, one for Delphi, one for perl, etc. And some sick puppy programmers like me would rewrite it. But only once, and I would use it everywhere I needed a tile floor, and I would try to convince my clients that their back lawn would look really nice with tile instead of grass.)

In software, the boring problems are solved. Everything you do is on the cutting edge by definition. So by definition it is unpredictable. That's why software has more of a science nature than a construction nature.

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.