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