Why does software development take so long?
People STILL confuse the construction of software with the construction of buildings. We can estimate fairly accurately how long it will take to build a building once we have reasonable plans for it. I can pretty accurately say that it will take about 4 minutes to build the software once I have the plans to build it. The compiler pretty much automates the whole job.<p>Writing software is NOT construction. Much of it isn&#x27;t even design. Most of it is gathering detailed requirements and writing them down in unambiguous form (code).<p>My asking how long it&#x27;s going to take to write a software it&#x27;s like saying to a building contractor how long will it take to design every single detail of a city block including gathering all the requirements.<p>Also the requirements for software are much more detailed than building. 100000 lines of code represents 100000 decisions. I bet not many buildings have 100000 decisions. And 10000 is tiny for a software project.