Writing software as easy as installing laminate flooring

May 28, 2012 at 8:09 pm | Posted in Agile, Programming | 2 Comments

At parties I usually try to avoid mentioning that I work in IT. There are a couple of reasons for this. First I often get a reaction like “Oh cool, I have this weird problem with Windows XP and my new printer. Since you are an expert, you can help me with that!” My answers range from anywhere between polite (trying to explain what I do for a living, which is not fixing Windows problems) and a simple “No, I can’t help you”.

The second question I often get is more like a remark of even an accusation: “why are software projects always late, expensive and unpredictable? By now everything is already available as standard libraries, so why is writing software not as simple a clicking existing components together?” These remarks mostly come from people whose software experience is limited to  small 100 line Visual Basic programs or from hobbyists who have tinkered a bit with Excel. Often they add examples like building a new house or bridge, arguing that this is way more difficult than building a simple piece of software and yet at the same time very predictable.

Lately I started telling those people (and others when giving a Scrum/Agile training) a story from my own experience, which is about installing laminate flooring in our house.

When I planned for this do-it-yourself activity, my first estimate was: 3 bedrooms and 1 hallway should take at most one weekend. Next I created an initial work breakdown structure (WBS):

1. Remove old carpet and floor panels: 1 hour
2. Install 50 m2 underlayment: 2 hour
3. Install 50 m2 laminate flooring: 8 hour

Nice, if I would work hard enough I could finish this on a single Saturday and have the Sunday for relaxing, spending time with my wife and kids or even write a blogpost! So I started and everything went more or less according to plan: first two steps took a little bit less, and in another hour I had installed the first 5 m2 of laminate. Since installing a floor is as easy as writing software I figured that I could scale 5 m2 to 50 m2, so that would take 10 hours instead of the planned 8. Well, not that bad.

But then I discovered that it would look way better if the laminate would be a bit under the skirting board, instead of against it which would leave some visible gaps. This was a bit of a setback since this would mean I probably couldn’t finish the job in one day. Luckily I still had the Sunday to finish the work. Then disaster hit: while removing the skirting board I discovered it was quite old and nailed into the wall with really long nails. So two things happened: part of the boards broke, while also part of the plaster felt off, damaging the walls.

Note: not my actual wall…

I decided to do a little bit of refactoring and reuse the old floor panels that I had removed from the first bedroom as skirting board. Without all the details my new WBS looked like this:

1. Remove old carpet and floor panels: 1 hour
2. Install 50 m2 underlayment: 2 hours
3. Remove old skirting board: 2 hours
4. Install 50 m2 limate flooring: 10 hours
5. Sawing 40 m floor panels into new skirting boards: 4 hours
6. Grinding 40 m skirting boards: 2 hours
7. Using a plunge router to add a nice profile to the skirting boards: 2 hours
8. Painting the skirting boards twice: 8 hours
9. Repair damaged walls: 2 hours
10. Remove remaining nails: 1 hour
11. Fixing new skirting boards to the walls: 4 hours
12. Some additional woodwork for the door posts: 8 hours

So my carefully planned 11 hours blew up to 46 hours! So that’s about 400 %. What’s worse, my initial lead-time of 1 day ultimately became 6 months. This simple seemingly  predictable set of tasks  behaved like a real software project after all with lots of unforeseen problems and new functionality during the project.

If I would have foreseen all those problems I might not have started at all. On the plus side I ended up with skirting boards that are way more beautiful than the original ones. And what’s more, I learned how to operate a plunge router, making me a better craftsman which will be useful in future projects.

Conclusion: writing software indeed is as predictable and easy as installing laminate flooring.