Re:You are not a software engineer (2011)
by jacques_chester on Sunday November 10, 2013 @07:30PM
(#6709202)
"Real" engineering has the commonality with software engineering that many projects are quite similar to previous projects and are thus fairly predictable. (This is true also of safety factors; I read a good book on it not too long ago[0]).
A bog ordinary 12 story building will probably come in close to schedule and budget because it's a well-understood problem domain and there is a large pool of existing examples to draw data from.
But the Burj Khalifa required solving some genuinely novel problems, of the sort which only turn up at that scale. When a project involves substantial R&D, schedules become much less certain.
If my business is churning out Wordpress brochureware, I can give a pretty good estimate of how long a given job will take and how much it costs.
If on the other hand my customers require me to develop novel, publishable algorithms, then any estimate I give will need to have very wide bands.
A bog ordinary 12 story building will probably come in close to schedule and budget because it's a well-understood problem domain and there is a large pool of existing examples to draw data from.
But the Burj Khalifa required solving some genuinely novel problems, of the sort which only turn up at that scale. When a project involves substantial R&D, schedules become much less certain.
If my business is churning out Wordpress brochureware, I can give a pretty good estimate of how long a given job will take and how much it costs.
If on the other hand my customers require me to develop novel, publishable algorithms, then any estimate I give will need to have very wide bands.
[0] http://chester.id.au/2013/07/07/review-to-engineer-is-human-...