What else is new? Everyone knows that software planning is, well, just impossible. Live with it!
I mean something else entirely. I mean that software planning, in the usual sense of the word, is literally impossible to do. Planning for a new house? OK. Planning a new road or intersection? You may not like the cost, disruption or time, but it can be done. "Planning" in the sense that everyone means it and uses it for everything else, is literally impossible for software.
Here's why, in a nutshell: a "software plan" that is the exact equivalent of an architectural plan for a building, including the materials list is the software itself. Anything less is a vague sketch of what part of the building might look like, something a builder asked to quote on it would say, "I'll be glad to give you a quote when you give me a plan. Which this is not."
Let me explain.
Building plans
Most people understand the basics of planning a building, say a house.
You start by answering some very basic questions, like How Big, and Where. This location and size information determine much of the eventual cost of the building.
You then go with architecture, i.e., the guts of building planning. Starting with size and place, you then go into the general shape and style of the house, things like How Many of What Kind of rooms and finishes. You may interact with the architect, creating several rounds of plans. As you agree to one level of generality, you dig deeper, ending with things like colors, appliances, and materials (wood clapboard vs. Hardie board, etc.). If the architect is modern, he'll show you 3-D renderings and give you 3-D walk-throughs of fully furnished rooms.
Here's an overview that I built using common software, two snapshots from different directions:
Notice the landscape, the terrain, the bushes, the shadows -- these are just snapshots from a complete 360 degree view. You can pick the angle, distance, height and even the position of the sun. Those are images of real clapboards, doors and windows that are commercially available, everything.
Here's part of a floor plan I built with the same software:
And here's a variation of that plan with a bunch of furniture added and some other changes:
Here's a sample 3D interior view from the software's website:
The software enables you to not just have pictures, but to do a full 3-D live walk-through, just like in a video game.
If the architect uses modern software, the software will not only assure that the building is structurally sound, the software will fill in all the structural elements, including electrical and mechanical, and produce an item-level materials list.
That's the plan! You can give it to builders for time and money quotes, and to the local building department for permits. Once you make an agreement with the builder, off starts the construction project. Hopefully it finishes about when promised, and you end up paying the agreed-upon amount. Done!
When it's done, unless the builder has screwed up, it will look in physical life just like the drawings and renderings, with all the selected materials.
Software planning
Software planning is basically the same as building planning, right? Except even better! With buildings, you're digging holes, pouring concrete, putting up framing, and all sorts of time-consuming, physical things that are costly to buy and install. By contrast, software is just writing code, a very non-physical activity -- any change you want or mistake you make is easily fixed, without ripping out building materials or breaking up concrete. Moreover, building planning is like old-style "waterfall" project management. Agile, the modern trend in software, isn't possible with buildings.
Why is it, then, that everyone with practical experience knows that software planning is a mess, a total nightmare, pretty much no matter what planning regime you follow? Why do you think the industry keeps coming up with new ways of planning things? For building planning, the methods were always effective, and with the increased use of software, the methods have stayed the same, but the ability to render the results to clients and automate error-prone architecture work has gotten better and better. For software planning, we experience a ever-ending sequence of planning "revolutions," each of which promises to eliminate the perennial problems. Except the benefits are always in the future, and the future somehow never happens. What's going on here?
At root, the cause of the problem is simple: the analogy of building planning and software planning doesn't work! But we keep trying.
Here's why: a plan for a building at the level of detail I described above is truly comprehensive. The ability to render detail in 3D makes that clear, and the ability to generate the structural elements and item-level material list makes it crystal clear. While it's incredibly comprehensive for a building plan, no software plan comes close to that level of detail in terms of building software!
The reason is simple:
A building (or road or bridge) is passive, built by workers and machines from a carefully assembled inventory of passive parts and materials, things like lumber, wiring, pipes, siding, concrete, etc. A program is active, a carefully organized set of instructions and data (mostly instructions, i.e., software) that do things in response to active inputs and stored data, as a result of which stored data is added or altered and new data and/or actions are created in the outside world (e.g., new screen displays, messages sent to distant servers).
This difference is a BIG DEAL. It's EVERYTHING!
The Building metaphor for software is bogus
Think back to the beautiful building plan I showed above, complete with its ability to enable a person to do a virtual walk-through of the building. That's like a software plan, right? It's kind of like what people call wire frames, mock-ups of the UI, right?
Now imagine that the software plan we're building is for a combat-oriented, multi-player video game. How close is that ready-to-build physical building plan to a plan for the video game? Ahhh, maybe 5%? The easiest 5%, for sure.
The detailed building plan we can walk through is like the "world" that video games create. Except the world is always changing. No building plan can deal with a player racing through the building, crashing through a window and firing a blast that blows a hole in a wall -- a hole that is customized to the location and angle of the shooter, the type of wall and the kind of blaster used. The wall explosion could further impact another game player on either side of the wall, in real time. This is the hard part, and where the vast majority of effort of building a video game goes. It's the action part.
Is building commercial transaction software like building a video game? No, of course not. There are some elements of video games that are unique. In other ways, building commercial software is harder than building video games! Video games are completely self-contained "worlds." For better or worse, commercial software is very much part of an existing, amazingly extensive world -- of other software! Existing software that is always changing, has bugs, is extremely elaborate, and whose actions depend not only on what you ask of it, but what's been asked in the past -- context. Commercial software is a complex series of actions, many of which involve interactions with other software that is no less complex.
What's important in software, and takes the VAST majority of the work, is the action part. A building is passive. It just sits there. Even the "passive" parts of software are created, on the fly, by the action part. For example, when you first go to a web page, it might be fairly passive. But the second you click on something, action starts. Once you login, the action gets fierce, and is created, on the fly, just for you: with data that's been stored for you and things on the screen that are customized for you.
This is the difference between walking into one of those Amazon retail book stores, which are what they are, and going to the Amazon website as a logged-in visitor. In the store, personalization is performed by a worker who walks up to you, who of course doesn't know your complete history of interactions with Amazon, which the software does and reflects in how it interacts with you. This goes all the way down to simple things; for example, if I go to the web page of a book I bought years ago but forgot, the software helpfully tells me I already own the book, would I like to get it again?
Conclusion
As usual, metaphors lead us astray -- even the universally-accepted metaphors for software. This is really sad, and the fact that it's gone on for decades is even sadder, with no signs of changing for the better. I've gone into the sources of the bogus building planning metaphor in great detail in my book on Software Project management, along with more detail on why the metaphor doesn't work.
All this history and logic is besides the point, in a way: the important thing is that, even today, the bogus building metaphor for software enjoys near-universal acceptance, in spite of its persisting monumental failures. Instead, the "leading minds" of the industry yammer on about irrelevancies like Agile and Scrum that may make people feel better, but don't change the underlying problem.
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Wonderful article great presentation which is help to gather more information.
Thank You For sharing.
Posted by: SOFTECH | 12/22/2018 at 02:21 AM