␡
- We Fail Too Much
- Definitions of Success
- The Standish Group
- Doing the Wrong Things
- Doing the Things Wrong
- Time Goes By, Things Improve
- One Reason: The Civil Engineering Analogy
- Giving Up Hope
- Ignoring Your Mother
- Bridges Are Hard, Software Is Soft
- We Swim in an Ocean of Change
- Accept Change
- Embrace Change
- Capitalize on Change
- A Better Analogy: Evolving Systems
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
Bridges Are Hard, Software Is Soft
There are advantages to the "softness" of software that the waterfall-style approach to software development does not allow us to capitalize on.
After you have laid the foundation for a skyscraper and put up a dozen floors, it is pretty hard to move it one block to the north. That is the nature of physical construction, and that is why architectural plans are generally not made to be changed; the cost of change is usually too high, or even impossible.
In software, however, there are ways of designing that allow for change, even unforeseen change, without excessive costs. Those ways are a big part of what this book is about.