24 December 2011

Metaphorically Thinking about Software Engineering




Please note this is a rewrite previous post that I was unhappy with.


Years ago I heard a comparison of software engineering to chemical engineering. I believe the intent of the analogy between the two fields was due to the fact that Software Engineering is a very young discipline just as Chemical Engineering was in relatively recent history, circa 1900.


Metaphors get used a lot in our industry, in Chapter 2: “Metaphors for a Richer Understanding of Software Development” of Steve McConnell’s Code Complete they are discussed in some detail.  In that chapter he cites the following:


A confusing abundance of metaphors has grown up around software development. David Gries says writing software is a science (1981). Donald Knuth says it's an art (1998). Watts Humphrey says it's a process (1989). P. J. Plauger and Kent Beck say it's like driving a car, although they draw nearly opposite conclusions (Plauger 1993, Beck 2000). Alistair Cockburn says it's a game (2002). Eric Raymond says it's like a bazaar (2000). Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas say it's like gardening. Paul Heckel says it's like filming Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1994). Fred Brooks says that it's like farming, hunting werewolves, or drowning with dinosaurs in a tar pit (1995). Which are the best metaphors?

I am not sure how apt the chemical engineering metaphor is either, but there are some interesting parallels.  The early chemical manufacturing process to produce sulfuric acid is called the Lead chamber process and it was invented in the mid 1700s. The process was not very well understood and was inefficient in that it required the use of expensive nitrates often from Chile which were partially lost as nitric oxide vapor, and it took over a hundred years before a way to recycle the part of nitrates was added to increase the efficiency of the process.  The discipline of chemical engineering was codified in the late 1800s when college curricula and associations for chemical engineering were created.  Over time the science of chemistry and stoichiometry advanced as did thermodynamics which made major steps forward around the same time. I am over simplifying here but eventually little understood processes that were discovered and tweaked empirically became understood and could be controlled and improved by applying the laws of science and mathematics.  Another parallel is the focus on reusable processes, in that if you are building a new plant to manufacture sulfuric acid you don’t want to design it from scratch each time.  An interesting and abstract parallel is that both disciplines have their entropies, i.e. thermodynamic vs. information. A social parallel may be the transformative effect that software is having on our lives and our society is as profound as that of industrial scale chemical production, this keyboard and almost thing I can see right now has been influenced in some way by chemical engineering.  Also what are the negative sides of these industries, what problems are we creating by the unregulated and somewhat opaque policies in regards to chemicals and what might some of the issues with software and IT be?



Now admittedly there is pretty big difference between a physical chemical process or the construction of something physical like bridge and software construction.  There are obvious parallels to building things in that people have to come together to build something that is greater than what one single individual could build. And there are similarities to Chemical processes in that once you build it that you have keep it up and running and you will probably need to do maintenance and make improvements while it is operational and even in some cases take it off line or build a new one in parallel while the old one is still in production.  Also might we possibly view Computer Science and Math as related to Software Engineering as Chemistry, stoichiometry and thermodynamics are related to Chemical Engineering?


Like Donald Knuth I too think there is an artistic element to software, this idea is not incongruent with building or bridge architecture which is a process that organizes groups of people to build something beautiful. Perhaps a possible analogy for software engineering would be the construction of a bridge where we still don’t really understand all of the physics behind it or the best way to go about it. As a result when we are done it might stay up and it might not and it will probably take longer than we thought to build it.


I guess the question is it possible to create a discipline of software engineering that is as effective as the other engineering disciplines? If we use the chemical engineering metaphor, where are we in the time line of understanding the underlying science and applying it to our process? Perhaps we are at the equivalent point to the mid to late 1800s in terms of process and our understanding of the underlying science but I very much doubt the years will map linearly, it’s probably more like an exponential mapping. The elusive software engineering is probably its own entity, are our metaphors confining our thinking and hindering our ability to objectively look at this problem?


The software industry is also different from almost any other technical industry in history just in the sheer number of people who now participate in it worldwide and it seems that the barriers to enter the field can be lower than that of other engineering and scientific disciplines in regards to formal degrees.


 


No comments:

Post a Comment