Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Thu, 10 Apr 2003

Construction

In my original announcement of Analogy Fest, I said it would be about new analogies, not questioning boring old ones like construction and engineering.

Still true. But here are two links about the construction analogy.

Bret describes how the contractor building his new office assumes that the cost of change is low.

I've changed my mind plenty of times, and it hasn't cost me a cent. My contractor assumes that changes will be made. My architect, and many software people who are keen to make analogies, presume that it is cheap to make changes on paper, but expensive to make them with the physical structure...

On Kuro5hin, there's a longer essay:

Over the next several paragraphs we will examine how the analogy is broken (disfunctional) and why it is dangerous to use the analogy to guide our efforts to make software better.

(Thanks to Paul Carvalho for the second link.)

## Posted at 12:06 in category /analogyfest [permalink] [top]