Software houses

January 8, 2007 by Artem

When talking about software development, often the building construction analogy is used. As every other analogy out there, it is not very accurate. Unfortunately this particular analogy is inaccurate in a very important way. Buildings are the artifacts of the material world, while software is non-material.

The virtual nature of software allows for the transformations impossible in the physical world. In the physical world there might be a possibility to add balconies to the existing house during the expensive renovation, but it is impossible to add a hundred floors to the the two-storey house, just because the grand city architecture plan changed and it is now possible to get bigger return of investment by building a sky-scrapper instead. It is impossible to adjust change the floor plan just before roofing in.

With the software similar changes can happen everyday. If database A doesn't scale up to the new demand, it can be replaced with the database B. If a website category structure doesn't appeal to the users it can easily be replaced with a tag cloud.

This kind of changes doesn't happen for free. In order to be easily adjustable the quality of already developed software should be permanently high enough. In order to be easily changeable, the software design should be kept tidy and re-factored bit by bit often. However, the opportunities opened by the permanently high design quality are enormous.

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