> I often hear people say that software engineering is a joke compared to civil engineering ...
I think your example points out exactly why some think software engineering is a joke: they rush ass first to implement something (and they implement the wrong thing) instead of sitting down and figuring out the actual requirements first like any real engineering job would have you do.
And it looks like everyone is pushing it more into this ass-first direction with agile. Let's not even try to plan ahead! You know what you want next week, so this short-sighted focus leads to chaotic development and once the real requirements are figured out 9 months into the project, well too bad it's too late to redesign and rewrite it all properly. So it's forever going to be a bumpy and crooked bridge on the verge of collapse, held together by more and more duck tape, hot glue and occult ceremony. And there's a plastic tunnel hanging underneath it. Only the brave will crawl through.
> instead of sitting down and figuring out the actual requirements first like any real engineering job
If it were so easy, then we would have done it already that way for the last seven decades. The simile topples over upon further contemplation:
civil engineers:
• client is not a domain expert
• to an overwhelming part, client needs are easy to transport into the mind of c.eng.
• can employ a wealth of standard solutions refined over the course of milleniums
software authors:
• client is a domain expert for the subject matter that the software is supposed to model
• to an overwhelming part, client needs are difficult to express and transport into the mind of s.auth.
• if a standard solution exists, the client would have already bought it off the shelf, so coming to a s.auth. always means customised development
• the entire sector is still in its proverbial baby shoes
We have to come to grips that we unfortunately can't apply what happens to work well for a different sector. The supposed value of non-traditional software methodology lies in that at least the client notices that the requirements are off the needs rather early.
I agree it's not easy, but instead of trying harder to become good at it, it seems like this industry in its proverbial baby shoes threw a tantrum and decided that it doesn't want to learn at all.
So instead of pushing for more effort & skill for up-front planning and modelling of the requirements and design (and trying to employ modelling tools & formal methods), we're just like fuckit nah let's just implement something and see where that leads us.
It doesn't help that so many of the up-front design failures were not examples of engineers screwing up but sales people selling shit and then having engineers cook it.
We'll be stuck in baby shoes for a long time with this approach.
We tried all that. Formal requirements gathering, modeling tools, the works. It was the SDLC/Six Sigma/ISO9000/vendor-certs-are-substitutes-for-degrees era of the late-90s/early-2000s. And it also didn't work.
Often times, it's very easy to determine the functional requirements: "Process this billing statement", "Spit out that report." The complexity doesn't come from the requirements. It comes from the constraints: "We only use this ancient version of this database", "We didn't tell you at the start that the users expect to interface with this system via email".
To quote Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face." The point of Agile is to get punched in the face earlier and more frequently.
> The complexity doesn't come from the requirements. It comes from the constraints: "We only use this ancient version of this database", "We didn't tell you at the start that the users expect to interface with this system via email".
Those constraints sound like requirements: we require that only this ancient version of this database is used. We require that users can interface with this system via email. Different term, same thing.
That's in the bucket with the kind of stuff that I'm advocating people should pay more attention to up-front. Gathering these requirements before you start designing anything is a big deal. If you failed to do so, then you failed to do a proper job at the part I called sitting down and figuring out the actual requirements.
There's another problem not really addressed here; when the requirements you get from the customer are wrong/make no sense/could be done better another way/are for things they won't actually use/are a part of some internal political struggle.
This is something that crops up quite frequently in my work. We'll get a requirement like this: "the app should use HTTP like a web browser, not a different protocol". On inquiry as to why it's so important for something that's not a web browser to so strongly resemble a browser, the answer will be something like, "so we don't have to ask IT to open a firewall port". The person deploying the software could just fill out the paperwork, but they find it easier to "require" that the software sneak past their own corporate security controls. This is the sort of requirement that is real in some sense and not in another sense, depending on whether you define the customer as whoever you're talking to on the phone right now or the business as a whole.
A lot of places will never give you access to the people who can answer those questions and will expect you to start work right away and "quit wasting time" or they "put you on a Performance Improvement Plan"/fire you. The problem is not developers doing a bad job, it's management preventing them from doing good job.
You're missing the point. In the real world some of those requirements are unknowable on any reasonable cost or schedule basis regardless of your analysis process. From an economic standpoint sometimes the best choice is to accept some uncertainty and get moving.
Companies are more than happy to churn through staff, losing millions in accumulated human knowledge, just to keep it out of the hands of employees.
My company just shut down an entire office, they offered three out of four critical employees the opportunity to move to Atlanta. They didn’t want to move, opting to retire instead. Company just shrugged their shoulders rather than letting them work remote, gave them like a month to transfer knowledge and that’s that.
Didn't we start by trying to plan ahead? There's a reason we have moved to agile.
In software if you know what you are doing ahead of time you are not really innovating and you might as well be using an existing system. Since everything that is standardised you can just use as libraries.
When building bridges, you can't just use a library that's .buildBridge(...parameters), even though similar things have been done thousands of times before. With code, if something is done enough times that you know how to plan for it, it is likely already a library.
You can plan building a bridge since you have done that and have experience of it thousands times over.
There is a reason we moved to Agile, yes, but it was the wrong solution to the right problem. Scrum identified the problem as a lack of accountability for management, and then imposed new processes on employees without any teeth to hold management accountable. That's why I hate Scrum's too-cutesy-by-half zoomorphization of the problem with the analogy of the chickens and pigs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig). In a real barnyard, the pigs and chickens are on equal footing: they are both slaves to the farmer. But in most software dev projects, the developers are not on equal footing with the project manager.
> Didn't we start by trying to plan ahead? There's a reason we have moved to agile.
"Everything was waterfall and then came agile" is myth, but yes, it looks like it's fashionable to no longer try to plan ahead. I'm not convinced the reasons are good, and I'm not convinced the craft of planning ahead was ever perfected to the point that anyone could say it doesn't work.
Scrum, XP, Agile all date back to the 90s when one server running PHP or Perl (with SQL injections) passed for software and others were still re-inventing basic data structures in C (and then gasp C++ with templates!) from first principles... The methodology, tooling, rigor, and collective experience in software development has taken leaps in the past two to three decades. Likewise, understanding systems and planning ahead has become so much easier. If only people took it seriously and spent as much effort on it as they spend on fad-of-the-year frameworks.
People just stopped trying, and when I look in software projects now, there's hardly ever anything resembling a model of the software that you could use to test new ideas "on paper" to see how they fit the given problem and current application.
> In software if you know what you are doing ahead of time you are not really innovating and you might as well be using an existing system.
I think the vast majority of software is boring and not even meant to be innovative and indeed would be best written using an existing system, but customizing these to the specific needs is just another can of worms. As with bridges, you can't just copy & paste an old bridge to a new location and use it as-it is, you need to design it given the locale and other constraints. It's still probably going to be yet another relatively boring bridge with no innovation.
And indeed a lot of software work is all about using existing systems, but perhaps at a lower level than you posited. Customizing complete off-the-self packages does happen, but it's more common to glue something "new" (but not innovative) using existing frameworks, libraries, services and glue languages.
You still need to design to do it right. But even here people seem to rush ass-first into whatever kit looks fashionable now.
Agile as a named methodology may date to 90s, but the concept of rapid iterations, incremental improvement, and constant feedback cycles has been on the books since at least 1950s.
The last time[0] I vented on the subject, I had to dig out the research papers I keep on my desk, because there was more than passing curiosity. Oh yes. I keep these on my desk so I can quote them when needed.
Check out this research paper from your nearest sci-hub entry point:
- DOI: 10.1109/MC.2003.1204375 ; "Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History"
"Not trying" is not new. The problems with both Waterfall and Agile is that nobody really ever did them the way they were intended. Waterfall was supposed to include prototyping during requirements gathering, specifically to aid in discovering constraints. Agile was supposed to give equal footing to all team members and not let the project manager spring new constraints on the team without planning for the change. Neither of those things happened very frequently, because our modern business culture treats knowledge workers as interchangeable minions, and management as unassailably perfect.
Yes, people don't do their jobs. That's not the fault of the process that they are failing to adhere to. Indeed, no process of any type could ever save them. It's the culture that is wrong.
So, in a roundabout way, I agree that Agile isn't the solution. No bottom-up process will ever succeed, because at the end of the day, the failure of the team is always the fault of the leader.
The binary thinking in this thread strikes me as odd. Is it bad to try and plan everything 6 months ahead of time? Yes. Is it also bad to fly by the seat of your pants and only plan 1 week ahead? Also yes. Instead, why don't we plan out by some intermediate time period. Say, 3, 4 weeks ahead of time. Or whatever time horizon ends up being the most efficient.
Yes there is no single correct planning horizon. The optimal horizon is proportional to requirements stability. At the extreme when requirements flux is extremely high then the best approach can be a Kanban process, planning no more than a day in advance.
> figuring out the actual requirements first like any real engineering job would have you do
There are no "actual" requirements for most software projects. Software is generally co-evolved with the audience.
Bridge designers can work like they do because bridges are hard to change and fundamentally pretty similar. But because software infinitely changeable and infinitely copyable, our field is different. If you're going to build 500 highway overpass bridges, you'll need engineers looking at each one, because local conditions and needs vary. But in software if we need to serve 500 users, we build one product, give each user a copy, and just keep adding features to solve the local problems.
A big reason we think software can be like bridges is that in the early history of our profession, we were tackling problems that almost worked in a waterfall context. That's because we were taking existing paper processes and automating them. But the hard part of requirements discovery via process coevolution had been done for us by people tinkering with paper and human working relationships.
That era is past. Today if the requirements for something are perfectly knowable, that's because it's either trivial or it's copying an existing piece of software. Any real product is discovering what's possible. It's growing along with its users' needs. It's solving new problems created by other people and groups.
I know of no significant piece of software that, like a bridge, hit 1.0 and just stayed there for a decade while getting plenty of use because the requirements were perfectly foreseen. Not one. To me that's a sign that perfect foreknowledge is, if not impossible, at least incredibly rare. So I think the thing to do is to figure out how to build excellent software with the expectation that needs will change.
Is that because that code and hardware is especially good? Because the initial design and research process was so perfect that people are still entirely happy with it? I'm guessing not.
There is no secret. You develop a process, enforce it, and refine it. It becomes bureaucratic, expensive, and boring. Just like the civil engineering people compare against here.
The process is nothing surprising. Write tests, document your code, follow the style guide, etc.
Thats because we have tried it the other way. Its called waterfall. The problem is, the process is too slow in such a fast moving industry.
If you are building a bridge, you dont have the problem of being half way done and all your customers say, "nah, nvm there is tunnel that just went up, that can kind of solve my needs. I will use that one instead."
I have been in a position where I have said no. I was able to stop the feature factory for a few months. But after that we were right back to cranking on features because several end users "validated our roadmap".
Santa Claus isn't going to fly down your chimney and deliver a fully formed business case. Developers share responsibility with other roles for figuring it out. Sometimes it takes multiple iterations of exploration and experimentation. Expecting to be told what to do is just lazy and unprofessional.
A large part of the problem is that grand majority of software (at least if it's facing actual human clients) is constantly trying to search or validate market-fit. If you don't get it out first, you're going to lose to a competitor who does.
And even when you do have a solid market-fit figured out, you still don't know what your customers will actually want. (And don't get me started on customer research. People lie all the time, and their accuracy on what features are honest-to-$deity blockers.. Nope.) This means that for most parts the incentives are misaligned and work actively against delivering high-quality software.
Underlying the agile manifesto is the need for engineering to be properly aligned with business incentives. Continuous delivery, fast iteration cycles, incremental improvements and rapid deployments are all facets of the same fact: you don't actually know what your customers want (because your customers don't know what they want!), and the only true way to figure it out is to iterate as fast as you can.
It's only when you have an established moat and a practically guaranteed, net-profitable income stream, when you can even imagine at having the opportunity of doing things the way you would assume you want to.
Oddly enough.. the companies who have such moats and guaranteed profits tend to be the same ones that have been the slowest to modernise themselves. Banks - until the modern online-only challengers came along. Insurance, where the regulatory moats are even higher and is only now being "disrupted". Loan brokering. Energy. Water. Public transport (where monopolies and/or charters prevent competition). Healthcare. On and on and on...
And even then, every one of these established, guaranteed-profit machines has the same problems: the moment one good new player enters the field and starts stealing customers, the old guard needs to find a way to either adapt - which is the best-case scenario - or rely on their power structures with politicians and quickly require new regulations to strangle the usurpers.
Software is expensive to make. It's only cheap to deliver. And time spent making the wrong thing is really expensive.
EDIT: I forgot to say this the first time around. Engineering career incentives are also misaligned. Maintenance is not appreciated, only shipping new stuff is. So the developers who would want to improve what exists and make it better will be looked down upon. The promotions and raises go to those who ship something new, even if it ends up setting the world on fire a year later.
The problem is that you cannot figure out the actual requirements. In every non-trivial application project I had so far, the requirements (and there were lots of them) were simply not correct. The requirements the actual users created, that is. They _think_ they know the workflow. They don’t.
If you don’t even ask the users, it’s even worse.
But that’s okay. It is simply not possible to accurately judge how something will work until you get to use it. That goes for the creators, too. That’s why we iterate.
Having worked on government projects, agile is definitely better than waterfall. The specs will change, better accept that early on and work with it, instead of trying to nail down the wrong thing.
Manager and Director are the people who are pushing "agile". They want quick results, and SE can only do what they want. You simply really can't "gather" requirement and finish a feature and do proper testing in a 2-week sprint.
I do agree there are a lot of bad practices in SE as well, but let's not blame everything on them.
Yeah I'm not really blaming individual software engineers (I'm in the same boat, fighting a slow trickle of feature after feature without really being given a chance to step back and consider the overall design & its future evolution), but the industry as a whole. As I said in another comment in this thread, all too often SEs are just tasked with cooking sh*t to vague spec (as laid out by sales & other non-engineers) instead of being active at the earlier stages where engineering should already begin.
It's like sales people together with the customer decided the shape and colour of the bridge, as well as the number of pillars it has, and how many lanes it has, and what material it's made of -- here's the stack of things you build with -- and what other fancy features it has, and now finally we can call the engineer so they can hop on a bulldozer and start engineering with their hammer for the next two weeks and show the result so we can adjust the shape if it's not as pretty as we imagined. Actual engineering didn't happen.
My understanding of Scrum is that requirement elicitation must happen before the sprint. Otherwise the story does not meet the Definition of Ready and the team should reject it.
It is completely possible to deliver a user story within a 2 week sprint provided that the acceptance criteria are reasonably clear. Many agile teams so this successfully.
Features (or epics or whatever) are larger and contain multiple user stories. In most cases features extend over multiple sprints.
People built a lot of ugly, useless, dangerous bridges before it was possible to plan and build a good one reliably. Even then, bridges still open with huge flaws. I think software engineering will get there eventually. Someone has to beat their head against the unknown a few times to map out its form.
I think your example points out exactly why some think software engineering is a joke: they rush ass first to implement something (and they implement the wrong thing) instead of sitting down and figuring out the actual requirements first like any real engineering job would have you do.
And it looks like everyone is pushing it more into this ass-first direction with agile. Let's not even try to plan ahead! You know what you want next week, so this short-sighted focus leads to chaotic development and once the real requirements are figured out 9 months into the project, well too bad it's too late to redesign and rewrite it all properly. So it's forever going to be a bumpy and crooked bridge on the verge of collapse, held together by more and more duck tape, hot glue and occult ceremony. And there's a plastic tunnel hanging underneath it. Only the brave will crawl through.