In part 1 of why software industrialization, I explained how even the simplest of end user software products still cant be designed right (i.e. washing machine firmware).

 

I have been a software professional for 15 years and I am still amazed at how little we have improved software engineering in our industry. The software development tools we use still feel like hammers and chisels to me.  The software development process, Agile or otherwise, seems overly complicated, convoluted and hardly predictable or repeatable, in addition to involving way too much effort and using people skills that vary wildly in knowledge and expertise.

 

I gave an example of how AutoCAD revolutionized/industrialized the engineering design world way back in 1982. We have nothing like this in our software development world.  In some respects, I think we have actually gone backwards instead of raising the level of abstraction to improve the process of software development, we are actually writing even more code as products and layers of interfaces are being added to our toolsets daily, plus watching vendor framework class libraries ever increasing in size, (literally 1000s of classes), but not really doing anything to raise the level of abstraction.

 

Here is another analogy I can give you to explain what I mean by the industrialization of software.  Too many years ago, I worked for an electronics company where I designed printed circuit boards by hand.  This meant hanging a circuit diagram (a real blueprint) on a wall and on a light table, with a Mylar grid 4 times the size of the physical circuit board, I laid down red and blue tape (for a double-sided board) of different thicknesses to represent electrical connections between components and different sticky symbols that represented resistors, capacitors, integrated circuit patterns, etc.  Once the layout was complete, we then had to shoot negatives (actually positives) of the layout (reduced by 4X), expose a blank copper plated printed circuit board in a UV oven, with the positive on top and then etched the unexposed copper away in a caustic chemical soup, which all tolled, took 2 weeks to complete.

 

I would work 8 hours a day times 6 to 8 weeks staring at a light table and as I made each connection (out of several hundred), I would highlight the connection on the circuit diagram (i.e. blueprint) to indicate a completed connection.  There were several design constraints, layout size of the circuit board, making sure power traces were not beside low level signal traces, etc.  Kinda like a chess game, except it took 6 weeks or so to see if you won or not.  If you painted yourself in a corner, it invariably meant a starting from scratch.  Management did not appreciate starting over, so we got real good at playing chess

 

Then industrialization hit the electronics/printed circuit board industry with the evolution of computer numerical control (CNC) that helped digitize the circuit diagram into an autorouter software program that automatically designed and laid out the printed circuit board from the digitized input by a light pen.

 

 

 

Today of course, this manual labor intensive process is fully automated.  The circuit diagram is now fully digital (remember AutoCAD) and the autorouter can simply read the circuit diagram and produce the circuit board directly with no human intervention or other intermediate steps.  In fact, the electronic circuit diagram is fed directly into this system and out comes the finished printed circuit boards (forget double sided, how about a dozen layers!), all in a matter of minutes to a few hours.  What used to take me 6 to 8 weeks or longer by hand is now reduced to minutes or hours, with no errors. How is that for industrialization?

 

What can we point to in our software industry, over the same time frame as our analogy above, that has reduced two months of manual labor intensive hand-coding effort into a matter of minutes or hours?  And I dont mean marketing words or the latest TLA buzzword SOA, or latest programming language, I mean some tool or generator that actually reduces the manual effort and coding required to produce a finished software product.  Can anyone point to anything that substantially has advanced the industrialization of software over the last 15 years?

 

In the software industry, we are still in the dark ages as far as I am concerned and my little blog here is a small attempt to try and help push the envelope of software industrialization from an educational perspective.  Hope you enjoy it.