What Makes Software Development So Hard?

lizzyben writes to mention that CIO Insight is running a short piece that takes a look at why the rocky culture of software development continues to exist despite all of the missed deadlines, blown budgets, and broken promises. From the article: "I was not really looking or thinking about big software projects. I was just coming out of my experiences at Salon, where we built a content management system in 2000, which was painful. I was one of the people in charge of it, and when the dust cleared, I thought, I don't really know that much about software development. Other people must have figured it out better than I have; I must go and learn. So I started reading, and talking to people, and realized it's a big subject and an unsolved problem. And the bigger the project, the harder the problem."

What makes software development so hard......

[Chineseyes]

Viagara, Cialis, red bull, two brazilian hookers and a swiss midget.

Re:good question

[xs650]

Why is herding cats so hard?

Software development is hard because....

[Anonymous Coward]

... of all the hot babes running around the offices in miniskirts giving massages that make it tricky to type. That, and the martinis that keep spilling in the keyboard. Combine that with the constant parties, sailing trips, ski trips, etc and it's a wonder anything gets done.

What's that you say? It's not the .com bubble anymore? Glad I left software.

Re:It's design not development

[MeanMF]

Software engineering is "Do X, Y, and Z except when A, B, but not C except when A and B and when user isnt E except when user is E and A and B and X and Y are not Z but Z is B when F is ..."

That was yesterday....We'll be sending you the updated specs soon.

Re:It's design not development

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have laughed, but this hit a bit too close to work.

Re:It's design not development

[StikyPad]

For the love of God! If you want us to troubleshoot your code, you're going to have to use some meaningful variable names and stop putting multiple operations on a single line!

Re:It's design not development

[0xdeadbeef]

Yeah, you're right. Kind of like how writing a novel is easy. It's creating an engaging plot with realistic and interesting characters, that's where it gets hard.

This non-insight brought to you by the discredited waterfall model, the ideology driving the outsourcing fad, and incompetent god-architects with no real programming experience.

What Makes Software Development So Hard?

[Ari Rahikkala]

Slashdot. :(

Re:good question

[__aaclcg7560]

They're like programmers who can't agree on where to go out for lunch without doing a probability analysis of getting food poison.

Re:It's design not development

[noidentity]

Fortunately, they do still teach English (at least in some parts).

Re:Today's applications are like 1850s houses.

[Grishnakh]

I suspect that in a century or two, software will be not unlike house-building is today.

So you're saying that in 100-200 years, almost all software will be developed by large companies who charge high prices, but hire illegal immigrants with little or no training to do the building? Worse, the software won't be written correctly, and won't be checked because 1) the company doesn't care and 2) the government software inspector is paid off by the company to look the other way instead of doing a proper inspection to make sure the software is "to code"? And while the software may look cool at first, it'll stop working in a few years after numerous parts have broken? And if all that wasn't bad enough, the software developers will come back to work after-hours and steal parts of the application and resell them on the black market?

No thanks.

I dont understand the question......

[MrBandersnatch]

Software development is now incredibly *EASY*. I mean we have tools such as C#, VB, .Net, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, COM, CORBA, SQL, J2EE, IIS, APACHE, XML, XSLT, HTML, XHTML, SOAP, XML-RPC, JBOSS, ZOPE, CSS, AJAX, Javascript, XQuery, XPath, UML, Patterns, SCRUMM, WMF, CardSpace, Passport, Windows, Linux, OS-X, WME, Direct-X, OpenGL, SDL, Eclipse, SVG....I mean, all this stuff software development still cant be "hard" now can it?

Re:Cats and penguins...

[thrillseeker]

It makes one wonder why the Linux mascot is a Penguin?

Indeed - it should have been this [emory.edu] - it so appropos in so many ways.

Re:It's not hard

[Brummund]

I have no idea, but according to his blog, he can't adjust his alarm clock. So, my guess is he's in management somehow. ;-)

( http://www.makesitgood.net/ [makesitgood.net] )