Building a bridge or tending to a garden
What is a software project?
It so often happens that building software is compared to construction work. This is a rather strange comparison as construction projects have huge budgets with huge margins for risk. They don't change requirements halfway down the lane. Once the blueprints for a building is complete, there will be no changes during build time, because everything is set in stone.
Errors made in software are also expensive to fix, but instead of having huge margins, software projects are often slimmed down so tightly that there is hardly room for bathroom breaks.
Software projects are nothing at all like construction work. There is this notion that software is more like gardening. The code is the garden that needs to be tended to and grown. If it's not properly taken care of, parts of the garden will fall into decay. This is not really a good observation, as code does not fall into decay if you leave it; it is the rest of the world...
