Software People Inspiring

Software Process Engineering - Shampoo For Men?

I've often wondered why we make a distinction between software projects - projects that produce software - and other kinds of projects, like weddings and highways and amateur operatic society productions.

For whatever reason, we appear to work from the basic assumption that there is something special about creating software that nullifies any experience or insight we have into other endevours.

Projects are usually made of the same stuff - stakeholders, work products, processes, phases, milestones, inputs and outputs, rules, goals, targets and so on. And all successful projects have one thing in common - they achieve their goals using the time and resources available.


The Software Process Engineering Metamodel - er, a bit like business modeling, only the same (but identical)?

So it does rather make me wonder why we might need a special modeling language designed for describing software development processes. I don't get that: why can't we just use the same notation we use for "ordinary" business modeling? Is this not just shampoo for men?

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