Visibility In Software Development Projects Is Higher Than In House Construction

It is so tempting to compare building a software product and building a house. There are so many articles and books who comment on this topic. End-users and project managers badly want software to be built in similar way to houses. And not surprisingly programmers are mostly against this.

I would not go into arguments about whether it is good analogy or not. Instead, I would like to point out one difference that makes software development much easier to manage, than house construction project.

Imagine, you are building yourself a new house (or renovating). Knowing you are an IT specialist, I would assume you hire the constructing professionals to do this for you ;) Everything is great during the start. You talk to the leader of the team. He listens to you carefully, seems to understand all your needs. Even the next step is great when you see the walls of your house starting to grow. You have a great feeling. But then, small surprises start to appear. One day you come to see the progress and you find one worker is doing nothing. You don't pay attention, as you think having a small pause is good and you also take breaks at your job. Next time, you discover a new surprise - there is no visible progress have been made during last week. And typically more surprises are waiting for you. You start to worry and demand reports from the hired constructing workers. After that, you find yourself visiting your house every day instead of every week. And the atmosphere of trust is getting ruined day by day.

But, now lets move to similar situation in software development. It is much easier to achieve visibility into what is happening in your "construction" team. when it is a software project. How is that? Because, in most cases you can access your "house" over the internet. Sure, the best way to add visibility into your software team work is by using our EyeQ product ;). But you can also check the progress by looking into the version control system logs. Products like FishEye can help you do some analysis on these log entries. And you don't even have to stand up from your chair for that.

In my opinion, software developers should not try to be as good as construction specilists. Instead they should try to use advantages in their hands and make their customers more happy than in case when they build houses.

Anybody still to argue that house construction is easier than software development?