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Why Your Software Project Is Failing
An anonymous reader writes: At OSCON this year, Red Hat's Tom Callaway gave a talk entitled "This is Why You Fail: The Avoidable Mistakes Open Source Projects STILL Make." In 2009, Callaway was starting to work on the Chromium project—and to say it wasn't a pleasant experience was the biggest understatement Callaway made in his talk. Callaway said he likes challenges, but he felt buried by the project, and reached a point where he thought he should just quit his work. (Callaway said it's important to note that Chromium's code is not bad code; it's just a lot of code and a lot of code that Google didn't write.) This was making Callaway really frustrated, and people wanted to know what was upsetting him. Callaway wanted to be able to better explain his frustration, so he crafted this list which he called his "Points of Fail."
Clearly you don't understand engineering. Engineering isn't just "model your entire design". Engineering is decomposing your problem into problems that are "spec-able". For example, build your bridge out of steel and bolts. You don't have a model of bolts in your design, you have a spec for bolts that you use in your design that is testable (performance and tolerance) and then you use parts hierarchically in your design. The bolt is designed separately and is made out of some alloy that has specs and is tested (performance and tolerance)...
The problem with most software isn't that it can't be modelling and rely on basic physical principles, it's that many projects fail to take specs and testing seriously, and the specs that exist don't address performance and tolerance (aka, error handling). If software did this, things would be more engineered.
Right now many software artifacts are similar to the prehistoric bridges that cross chasms in jungles in third world countries. They work, people cross them every day, but things were made empirically so nobody knows what might cause them to fail, so it's hard to rely on them.
It's not that bridges that were built 100 years ago were "better", but they were actually built to specs and of course survive to this day (which can't be said for the prehistorical variety). However, improved bridges are continually desired so we use better parts and build even better bridges today because modeling allows us to get tighter specs on the parts that make up bridges and the stresses that we are putting on those parts.
But doing all that requires better engineering discipline not dismissing it as a something that isn't applicable. Engineering is an useful approximation of the physics (an approximation which always gets improved over time), not a practice of physics.