What exactly is software development, and why is it so hard? This is a question that continues to engage our thoughts. Is software development an engineering discipline? Is it art? Is it more like a craft?

We think that it is all of these things, and none of them. Software is a uniquely human endeavor, because despite all of the technological trimmings, we're manipulating little more than the thoughts in our heads. That's pretty ephemeral stuff. Fred Brooks put it rather eloquently some 30 odd years ago[Bro95]:

   "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)"

In a way, we programmers are quite lucky. We get the opportunity to create entire worlds out of nothing but thin air. Our very own worlds, complete with our own laws of physics. We may get those laws wrong of course, but it's still fun.

This wonderful ability comes at a price, however. We continually face the most frightening sight known to a creative person: the blank page.....