In the United States, the International Building Code (IBC) specifies how commercial and residential
construction must be carried out.
Professional architects and engineers pass rigorous state licensing exams to participate.
Contractors and trades people undertake apprenticeships and follow well established
construction methods and conventions.
Their work is verified by building inspectors during all stages of construction.
Very little is left to chance and the vast majority of projects are completed successfully.
Contrast the above approach to an average software development project.
Likely, there is little in common.
At many companies, software development does not follow any standards and the results are unpredictable.
In fact, it is much more likely that any two software systems will be more different then alike.
In the software industry there is no IBC, no professional licenses, and no inspectors.
Much is left to chance and the vast majority of projects are not completed successfully,
on time, or within budget.
This lack of any standardization within companies, and across the development industry, is a root cause of
high development and maintenance costs, and results in many failed projects.
The emergence of multicore processors will further exacerbate this situation.
The industry is approaching the end of ad-hoc software system architectures.
Ad-hoc designs that worked on single or dual core processors, will not scale up to an 8, 16, or 32 core processor.
These new multicore processors will require development methods based on task dispatching and message passing frameworks.
We see this shift already in Apple's MAC OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
Apple introduced
Grand Central Dispatch (
GCD), a major new architectural component, precisely for this reason.
GCD is a move away from the ad-hoc, lock based, multi-threaded programming model to a dispatch based model.