News April 2013: "If engineers could build a bridge, and for not very much cost could test it to destruction by driving something heavy over it but with no casualties and leaving no debris; and, finding that it didn't handle the heavy vehicle, could just work on buttressing some aspect of the bridge, and for not very much cost a couple of days later put the next version of the bridge up for testing, it wouldn't surprise me to see bridges developed in just that way. And finally I realised that software engineering differs from most other types of engineering in a very specific way. We have a cost model that mostly encourages us to build incomplete constructs, because it's relatively cheap to fix. Where this doesn't apply (nuclear power plant management, aircraft fly-by-wire systems, etc), development times are much longer and much more expensive (for the equivalent amount of software).
Is this good or bad? I make no judgement. But I will observe that in the last 20 years the way people live in large chunks of the world has dramatically changed from all the half built continually buttressed software engineering projects that make up the web, the world of apps, and all that we can find in cyberspace, on our laptops, desktops and phones."
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