Jon Udell speculates in his latest post that "the film industry's project-oriented, just-in-time assembly of resources and talent" is the model for modern business. This is really interesting because I was talking to a friend who is both a software engineer and an amateur filmmaker, and he was drawing paralells to software and filmmaking; for example, a filmmaker shoots a lot of film, but doesn't really know how things are going to turn out until the editing process. Which is a lot like software, where it's even more difficult to see where you're going until you get to integration. What's funny is that last night, we were talking to a mutual friend who's a project manager for a construction company. He described his job as "protecting his boss' money", in that the builders will come up with a proposal for how to complete part of a project, and he's the guy who tells them to come up with a cheaper solution. My filmmaker friend exclaimed, "you're the producer!", as in a film producer, who's supposed to rein in the director and the people involved in actually making the film. So I had the realization that the construction industry works this way as well: a builder or developer generally doesn't build anything, they hire people to build it for them. So somebody gets the job of contracting and scheduling the work of concrete workers, drywallers, plumbers, electricians, painters, etc.

I've been annoyed for some time with people drawing paralells between software development and the building trades, preferring the comparison to filmmaking, but in fact, maybe the comparison is OK. It's just that the people making comparisons to the building trades think that the construction industry works differently than it does in reality. The reality is that construction and filmmaking are probably more related. Software development as it's typically practiced isn't much like construction, but maybe it should be. Which makes some of the current trends in the Software industry, in particular the practice of standardizing on a technology, assuming that people can be retrained to do anything, and plugged into any project ("matrix management" as they call it around my work) seem as ridiculous as a developer hiring a bunch of construction workers and assuming that they can train concrete finishers to be electricians.

Jason Diamond just informed me that the links on my Unit Test macro page point at the wrong version of the macro. I'll fix the page later, but for now, the macro is available in VB format. I'll work on fixing the links on the main page tonight.

Update: the links are fixed, let me know if there's any other problems!